Now that we've looked at the news Let's take a look at some of the tools that you may see in digital
applications.
On the left hand side here the first thing we have is just the general positioning to lead us to move
objects and manipulate things on the various layers.
The next thing we have is the marquee selection tool.
A very common tool.
And essentially it lets you drag a rectangle or a square shape to create a selection and then you can
modify that selection using a modifier key which in Photoshop is the Command key.
The Machi selection also comes in an elliptical Machi tool which is essentially a an ellipse.
You can hold shift to constrain the proportions.
That means keep it in a perfect circle and conversely you can do the same thing with the rectangular
marquee tool.
So constraining here to a square it's very useful when you just want to select a large area of something
when it's like a circular area or something.
The next tool is the free hand selection tool.
It's called the less search tool but more common name for it.
And essentially you can just draw out your selection in any particular shape that you want.
Fashion also offers a polygon a less so tool which I like to call the point to point less tool because
essentially you just add points point to point.
And it's useful for being more accurate.
You can also do complex curves with this too.
If you put a lot of small points together people won't know that it's actually really done in a polygon
fashion.
So you can get some nice accurate selections using the when to point where the polytonal less or to.
There are some other some options as you see in the selections.
Just going to go through the general options the crop tool essentially allows you to crop the canvas
and change its size.
Very similar to a feature that's a must for editing apps is to crop the canvas.
Photoshop is great in this respect because it adds a rule of thirds guideline for compositional purposes
which is very useful.
And we'll learn about this in the composition course.
Write the eyedropper tool is quite crucial.
You have a piece of artwork and you want to continue painting that particular value or color that you've
used and simply use the proper tool to pick it up.
I would say most of the time you won't be clicking the icon you'll be on the brush tool which will go
through just now and you'll hold the old key.
Both Windows and Mac.
It's the same key and this instantly switches to the eyedropper.
So if you were painting something you can quickly of color pick and struck an old color pick and stroke
and kind of pick and stroke you'd do it very quickly.
Right.
Talking about the brush too.
There were two subsets of the brush tool in Photoshop.
Photoshop has the brush tool and the pencil too.
Now other applications will list separate tools for example you'll have a marker to a pen tool a clutch
pencil to you know a an oil brush too.
And they have a lot of preset settings for those so that those tools behave very similarly to the traditional
media of course based on the software you're using.
Photoshop leaves everything up to the brush tool.
And it's brushes and every single brush.
So this is the brush selection panel here.
Every single brush has various settings in the brush settings area over here that can be adjusted.
Now I know this may look a little complicated if you've never seen it before.
It's not that complicated although you can set quantity plethora of options to have a brush behave in
the way you'd like it to behave.
There are shape dynamics which control the brushes shape and size based on various sitting such as the
pain pressure of your tablet and so on and so forth.
And this is photoshop way of giving you different media options but using a single two.
And I think both systems are great whether you're having multiple tools pains and markers and so forth.
We are using different brushes.
So for example in Photoshop if I select a brush that is a hard run brush we're going to get a hard round
edged Russia over here and you can see the edges are quite sharp on that brush.
VS if I took a soft run.
And these are the most common brushes in Photoshop I get a very airbrushed look.
And then of course you get two more complex brushes.
It's like the chalk brush has a bit of a chalky look to it.
You just do a single tap or the side you can see it has a bit of an nice little rough edge and that's
very nice when painting.
So photo shops brush tool also has its own independent opacity control.
That is how transparent the painters and the flow control how much paint is coming out as you press
with your stylus digitally.
You can add and remove brush presets create your own and you can modify the angle and the size of the
brush the sort of squash of the brush here.
And based on the tool you're using you'll get additional options such as the hard brush.
You can change that size option here and it's hardness and sizing is very important in digital art applications
brush sizing.
Usually it's the square brackets on your keyboard.
They'll quickly modify up and down the brush size.
Right.
And that's essentially the brush to the tool below does the pencil to the pencil tool and the brush
will both shade the brush options palette.
However the pencil too is a tool I think is very useful when you want to get extremely sharp edges because
the pencil is basically going to fill in direct pixels without modifying the ages of the brush very
much.
It keeps everything very sharp and Chris.
So that's just sort of a small tip if you will.
If you want something that has a very very sharp edge perhaps one of your focal points needs very sharp
edges.
The pencil tool can help you achieve that move onto the eraser to shortcut for that is easy and that's
a generally generally very common shortcut if you're using Karle pendula Szoka would be in the phrase
tool is very similar to the pencil and brush tool uses the same brushes.
So you can get the same effects except of course in a way that it's going to be erasing elements the
gradient tool is fairly useful can be very useful not all the applications have this.
It allows you to create different color gradients and then it will fold them onto the scene.
So for example I choose this this dark purple to sort of a pinkish color.
I can fool the entire scene with that gradient.
Now usually you'd use this in the mental way you're feeling a color to transparent so as you can see
here it's showing white to transparent.
You can then select a color.
Let's say we take red and we can full Ridge to transparent.
So let's delete this last.
We can just do a gentle gradient there.
When you want to do overlays and other special effects when you want to perhaps do a sky full or what
have you.
The gradient full allows you to do nice smooth folds from a color to transparent or from a color to
another color gradient too also has different full options.
For example there's the radial gradients too and it does a radial gradient acyclic rating.
And there there's a bunch of other options here as well we are going to go to in depth on those but
this can be a very efficient time saver to use other tools here.
The smudge to the shop in the blue to the blue tool blue elements the sharpened tool shopping elements
the smudge tool very much smudge things.
So let's just do a quick example of this much too it's often I've noticed it's been shunned upon in
the past although many many artists today are using it fairly effectively to blend colors if they're
not blending a in a normal way and you can see the smudge tool is exactly how it sounds it's smudges
smudges elements not feeling blows as if you were using your finger on which paints very similar to
that and also smudged too.
Once again it also shares the same brushes and the brush modifications so you can have the smudge tool
doing some very cool things which we'll look at later.
In addition we have essentially exposure modification tools that's a dodge tool and burn tool and these
tools basically Latin and Darkon have nots midterms or shadows.
However I don't really want to go too deep into that right now.
We'll look at them later.
They can be overused and used incorrectly and mess up a piece of artwork because of their misunderstanding
of how to use those tools.
Now we have the pintu for Podsnap very important to us.
That takes us to just a very typical takes to you Droi text.
You can top what have you inside it and that's good when you're doing lots of pre-text into your works
in the selection tool.
And then we have the shape tool which allows you to draw shapes rectangle rounded rectangle ellipse
and then also the custom shape to which gives you a bunch of custom shapes that you can pop into your
pieces or modify or what have you.
Also create your own custom shapes in Photoshop.
Most applications should have a shape to at least offering a rectangle and an ellipse when you want
to drop perfect ellipses perfect rectangles and funny a line to let you draw straight lines of varying
thicknesses.
Very useful because of course you don't put a ruler on your screen.
Let's say that's not doable but perhaps not practical.
So the line to Laz's to draw perfectly straight man's rifle laying out prospective grids and what heavy
loss the the hands too lazy to move your canvas.
So based on your screen sitting holding spacebar and pressing you'll be able to move your canvas around
right for when you're wanting to look around a piece and view various sections up close and to pan.
Finally we have the magnification too.
And that's your typical magnification tool.
Very common in most applications.
I use the navigator window and most will also have this and it has little Zoom Bahiya.
So I control my Zoom.
I find that very efficient.
Then we have the foreground and background color boxes and then the masking tool we won't go too deep
into those.
Right now we look at the color palette Shaki and that is essentially the general tools overview.
Most applications Schey a lot of these tools particularly the selection tools the brush tools and the
much too.
So let's move on and take a look at the palettes on offer.