The Photoshop toolbox is located at the left side of the screen; it contains the tools you will use to edit your images. The default single column toolbox can be changed to a two-column toolbox by clicking on the double arrow at the upper left corner of the toolbox, click again to bring it back to its original state.



The first thing to know about tools is that, there are more than meet the eye. There are so many tools, that they all don’t fit in the toolbox, and so what Adobe has done is hid some tools behind others. If you see a tool with a black arrow-head at the lower-right corner of the tool icon, click and hold on that tool and you will see a list of related hidden tool icons.



To select one of those tools, you just move your cursor to one of the items in the fly-out menu and release. There is another way of selecting tools, and that is by using keyboard shortcuts. You don’t have to memorize each keyboard shortcut for each tool in the toolbox. In fact if you move your cursor over a tool for a few seconds, you will see a tooltip with the corresponding keyboard shortcut.



Using keyboard shortcuts will help you to become more efficient and more productive when working in Adobe Photoshop.

Whenever you select a tool in the toolbox, notice the tool option bar updates to become specific to the tool you have selected.



Sometimes, when you change the options in the tool options bar, they have a tendency to become sticky and retain the settings you have made to them the last time you used a specific tool. This can be annoying at times when you want it to go back to its original settings for another project. Or if there are different users who use the same computer and you want to revert to the tools default settings. Then you have to remember how to reset the tools option to their defaults. On Windows, Right-Click on the tool icon on the tool options bar, on a Mac Ctrl+Click on the tool icon on the tool options bar.



A menu will pop up with two listed options. Clicking on the Reset Tool will allow you to reset the options for the currently active tool, while clicking on Reset All Tools will reset the tool options for all tools in your toolbox. I recommend resetting all your tools between projects or if another user has just finished using the same machine. You don't need to memorize all the tools at this point as you will learn how to use each of them as we go along with future projects and tutorials.