Tool Icons

If you have used any Macintosh drawing program, some of the icons in this toolbox should look familiar:

The marquee and lasso tools are used to select regions of the image for editing. Once an area is selected, you can cut, paste and copy as you might expect. Photoshop also provides a large selection of more sophisticated image transformations that can be applied to a selected region.

You will notice a small arrowhead in the bottom right corner of each of these tool icons. When an icon in the PhotoShop toolbox contains this little arrow head, it indicates that several other related tools are actually hidden under the displayed tool. When you depress the mouse on such a tool, a pull-out menu displaying the other tools appears and you can select whichever tool is most appropriate for your task from this menu.

The text tool is used to insert text such a captions or labels into an image. A dialog box that lets you control the text's content, size, alignment and other options appears after you select this tool and click where you want the text placed.

The paint can tool can be used to replace all pixels similar to a pixel you click on with a new color or pattern.

The line tool is used to draw straight lines in the image. Options are available to control the thickness of the lines drawn and to add arrowheads.

The pencil and brush tools are used to draw freehand lines in an image. The pencil tool draws lines with sharp edges while the brush tool draws lines with soft edges.

Although I have grouped these two tools together because of many similarities in their behavior, Photoshop actually groups the pencil tool and the line tool in one pull-out menu.

The eraser tool lets you "erase" pixels in an image, where erasing really is the same as painting with the background color instead of the foreground color.

The toolbox also contains some icons that may not be so familiar. We will be using three of these tools during this lab:

The magnifying glass shaped tool is used to zoom in to take a closer look at a portion of an image.

The cropping tool is used to completely remove all but a selected rectangular region of an image. This tool is grouped in a pull-out menu with the rectangular selection marquee.

The magic wand is a selection tool like the marquee and lasso. By clicking somewhere in the image with the wand, you can select all pixels of similar color adjacent to the place where you clicked.