This tool, shaped like a diagonally cut square in the right tool bar, allows for trimming down an image or layer. Options include a freeform crop or set aspect ratio, like square.

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

Photoshop tools are specialized instruments within the Adobe Photoshop software that provide a wide range of capabilities for image alteration, manipulation, and graphic design.

Photoshop Tools

This tool, shaped like a stamp in the right tool bar, allows you to take pieces of an image and overlap on another area. This is often used to edit people out of the background of images or edit out blemishes on portraits. In its place is a repeated piece of sidewalk or skin for those examples, respectively. 

Clone Stamp

This tool, shaped like a lasso rope on. the right tool bar, allows for selecting a piece of an image that can be later manipulated.

Lasso Tool

Crop

The paint tool, shaped like a paint brush in the right tool bar, allows for adding color to an image in locations of your choice. Using design tools, the paint brush can be altered in size, transparency, color and shape.

Paint

This tool allows for elimination of an image or layer on the areas of the user's choosing.

Eraser

This tool, shaped like an eyedropper on the right tool bar, selects the color of a part of the existing image. This is often used for selecting a color from the design to use for another section, like added text, to give a cohesive look. 

Eyedropper

This tool is perhaps the most important in all of photoshop because it allows you to move around the photo you are viewing. This is also used for moving selected layers around a photo, editing graphic designs, adding shadows, manipulating an image, etc. This tool is one of the reasons why Photoshop is so manipulatable and user friendly.

Move

This tool, shaped like a raindrop, allows for blurring an image in the area of your choosing. Using other design implementations, users can manipulate the degree of blur, size and shape, much like the paint brush. This requires selection of a particular layer or image because it is not an addition to a design, but manipulates an existing one directly.

Blur

This tool, shaped like an equilateral triangle, sharpens an image or design. It works by increasing the pixilation and degree of contrast of color so that the selected area appears more in focus than it was originally. Like the paint and blur tools, the size and degree of the tool may be altered. This is often used by photographers for increasing the clarity of selected faces in portraits.

Sharpen

This tool, shaped like a finger, is used for smudging an area of the image. Whereas the blur tool eliminates clarity, the smudge tool combines color and textures in the direction of the user's choosing depending on how they drag this tool. This is often used for blending harsh lines made by graphic design or a rough erasing

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