Photoshop Tools and Toolbar Tutorial

Photoshop Tools and Toolbar Overview

Learn all about Photoshop's tools and the toolbar. You'll learn how the toolbar is organized and how to access its many hidden tools. Includes a complete summary of the nearly 70 tools available in Photoshop that you lot can use as a reference! Now updated for Photoshop 2022!

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In the offset tutorial in this Photoshop Interface series, we took a general tour of the interface and its principal features. This fourth dimension, we'll learn all almost Photoshop's tools and the toolbar. The toolbar is where Photoshop holds the many tools we have to work with. There are tools for making selections, for cropping and retouching images, for adding shapes and type, and many more than!

We'll start with a look at the toolbar itself, including how the toolbar is organized and how to access the many tools subconscious within it. Then nosotros'll look at each and every tool in the toolbar with a quick summary of what each tool is used for.

I'm using Photoshop 2022 but you can follow along with earlier versions as well. Only notation that some tools may not exist available in your version.

This is lesson 2 of 10 in my Learning the Photoshop Interface chapter.

Let's become started!

The Photoshop toolbar

Photoshop's toolbar is located forth the left of the screen:

The Photoshop toolbar and tools

The toolbar.

Choosing a unmarried or double cavalcade toolbar

By default, the toolbar appears as a long, unmarried column. But it can be expanded into a shorter, double cavalcade by clicking the double arrows at the top. Click the double arrows again to return to a single column toolbar:

The Photoshop toolbar in a double column layout.

The toolbar tin be viewed in a single or double column.

The tools layout

Let's look at how Photoshop's toolbar is organized. While information technology may seem like the tools are listed randomly, in that location's actually a logical club to it, with related tools grouped together.

At the pinnacle, we have Photoshop's Move and Pick tools. And directly below them are the Ingather and Slice tools. Below that are the Measurement tools, followed by Photoshop'south many Retouching and Painting tools.

Adjacent are the Drawing and Blazon tools. And finally, we accept the Navigation tools at the bottom:

The tools layout in the Photoshop toolbar.

The layout of the tools in the toolbar.

The toolbar's hidden tools

Each tool in the toolbar is represented by an icon, and there are many more tools available than what we see.

A small arrow in the bottom right corner of a tool icon ways that there are more tools hiding backside information technology in that same spot:

The arrow in the toolbar indicating that other tools are available.

Most of the spots in the toolbar hold more than 1 tool.

To view the additional tools, click and hold on the icon. Or correct-click (Win) / Command-click (Mac) on the icon. A wing-out carte du jour will open listing the other tools that are bachelor.

For instance, if I click and agree on the Rectangular Marquee Tool icon, the fly-out card tells me that along with that tool, the Elliptical Marquee Tool, the Single Row Marquee Tool and the Single Cavalcade Marquee Tool are likewise grouped in with it.

To cull one of the additional tools, click on its name in the list. I'll choose the Elliptical Marquee Tool:

Choosing a hidden tool in the Photoshop toolbar.

Choosing a hidden tool from the wing-out carte du jour.

The default tool

The tool that's initially displayed in each spot in the toolbar is known equally the default tool. For example, the Rectangular Marquee Tool is the default tool for the second spot from the tiptop. But Photoshop won't e'er display the default tool. Instead, it will brandish the last tool you lot selected.

Notice that afterward choosing the Elliptical Marquee Tool from the fly-out carte du jour, the Rectangular Marquee Tool is no longer displayed in the toolbar. The Elliptical Marquee Tool has taken its identify:

The Elliptical Marquee Tool is now the visible tool in the toolbar.

Each spot in the toolbar displays either the default tool or the last tool selected.

To select the Rectangular Marquee Tool at this point, I would need to either click and concord, or right-click (Win) / Command-click (Mac), on the Elliptical Marquee Tool icon. Then I could select the Rectangular Marquee Tool from the card:

Selecting the default tool from behind the previously selected tool in the Photoshop Toolbar.

Selecting the Rectangular Marquee Tool from behind the Elliptical Marquee Tool.

A summary of Photoshop'due south tools

And so now that we've learned how Photoshop's toolbar is organized, let'due south look at the tools themselves.

Below is a quick summary of each of Photoshop's tools, forth with a brief description of what each tool is used for. The tools are listed in order from top to bottom, and specific tools are covered in more detail in other lessons.

An asterisk (*) subsequently a tool's name indicates a default tool, and the letter in parenthesis is the tool's keyboard shortcut. To cycle through tools with the aforementioned keyboard shortcut, press and hold Shift every bit you printing the letter. This list is up-to-engagement as of Photoshop 2022. Note that some tools are not available in before versions.

Where to go next...

And in that location we have information technology! Now that we know more nigh Photoshop's toolbar and its many tools, the next lesson shows you how to reset Photoshop's toolbar back to its original, default layout!

You tin jump to any of the other lessons in this Learning the Photoshop Interface chapter. Or visit our Photoshop Basics section for more topics!