Photoshop has some very powerful drawing tools. The brushes are packed with features that allow you to create your own wonderful and cool works of art, touch up photos and create amazing work.

In This Chapter:

Color Picker

Choosing color in Photoshop is very easy by simply locating the color you want and clicking it on the color picker. Color pickers are located in several places in Photoshop and you can use these again and again.

Choosing Colors

Photoshop allows you to select from a range of colors. You can choose the foreground/ background color, fill a portion of an image and do many more things.

Drawing Tools

The drawing tools are easy to use and can transform your work from the ordinary to the extraordinary. Brushes are the main drawing tools and are versatile and extremely customizable and are used for everything from touching up photos to creating works of art.

Smudge, Sharpen and Blur Tools

These painting tools simplify existing pixels in various ways. They do not create any paint and are useful drawing tools, that when used in conjunction with the paint brushes create fascinating effects.

Dodge, Burn and Sponge Tools

These tools alter the tonality and color saturation of the pixels to which they are applied and are favourites for touching up photographs.

Gradient Tools

Gradients are gradations between colors or blends. Gradients add a lot of visual interest to images and break up flat color.

Shape Tools

You can draw basic shapes quickly by using the shape tools, which are accessed from the tool palette. You can switch among different shapes from the options bar.

Transform Tools

Photoshop makes transformation of an image like scaling, rotating, flipping skewing, perspective and distortion very simple and easy. These features help images that have been scanned with a wrong orientation, to resize images and to achieve precision results.

Patterns

Repeating patterns make a good alternative to color gradients for filling objects. Any object can be turned into a pattern. Patterns are fairly simple to use and easy to create.

History

The history palette saves the most recent versions of the image. Each version is called a history state. The only drawback is that when you have reached the set number of history states, each new edit will replace the oldest state in the palette, i.e. the states are cycled.