Tools reference

The toolbar works like Photoshop's: tools are organized into groups, one button per group. Press a group's key letter to activate it, press Shift + the letter to cycle through the group's subtools, or long-press / right-click the button to pick from the fly-out.

1. One button per group — the small corner triangle means more tools live inside. Press the group's key (here B) to activate it.
2. The fly-out — right-click or long-press the button to pick a subtool; Shift+B cycles through them without opening it.

The options bar

Every tool puts its settings in the options bar across the top of the workspace, and it changes with the active tool. With the Brush selected:

Size and hardness on the left, then blend Mode, Opacity and Flow with the A airbrush toggle between them, stroke Smoothing, and brush angle. Selection tools swap these for their own options, and so on for every group — when a tool doesn't behave the way you expect, the options bar is the first place to look.

Colors, Quick Mask and screen modes

The bottom of the toolbar holds three more controls:

1. Foreground and background colors — click a chip to open the picker, use the small corner swatches to reset. X swaps foreground and background, D resets them to black over white.
2. Quick Mask (Q) — toggle Quick Mask mode to paint selections with any brush.
3. Screen mode (F) — switch between workspace views.

The tool groups

Each tool's settings appear in the options bar under the menu. The sections below cover the options that matter most.

Selection tools

• Marquee (M) — rectangular and elliptical selections, plus single-row/column. Options: New/Add/Subtract/Intersect modes, Feather (0–250 px), anti-alias, and a Style menu for fixed-ratio or fixed-size drags. Hold Shift while dragging to add to a selection, Alt/Option to subtract.
• Lasso (L) — freehand. The Polygonal Lasso clicks straight segments (Enter closes, Esc cancels, Backspace removes the last point); the Magnetic Lasso snaps to edges, tuned by Width, Contrast and Frequency.
• Magic Wand (W) — picks similar colors, controlled by Tolerance (0–255), Contiguous, anti-alias, Sample All Layers, and a Sample Size averaging menu.
• Quick Selection — paint to grow a selection, with brush size, tolerance and a Hard Edge option.
• Object Selection — drag a box (or lasso) around a subject; there's also a Select Subject button. This is a local heuristic that finds the dominant foreground region — fast and private, but not a machine-learning cutout, so complex subjects may need a pass of Quick Selection cleanup.
• All selection tools offer Select and Mask… for edge refinement. More in Layers, masks & selections.

Painting tools

• Brush & Pencil (B) — Size, Hardness, blend Mode, Opacity, Flow and stroke Smoothing. [ and ] change size while painting. The Brushes and Brush Settings panels hold presets.
• Mixer Brush — blends colors already on the canvas, with Wet, Load and Mix controls.
• Color Replacement — repaints hue while keeping texture.
• Gradient (G) — Linear, Radial, Angle, Reflected and Diamond shapes, with Reverse, Dither and Transparency options, plus the Gradients panel of presets. Paint Bucket fills with the foreground color or a pattern, with tolerance.
• Eraser (E) — brush, pencil or block modes. The Magic Eraser deletes similar pixels in one click (like the wand + Delete); the Background Eraser samples as you drag to peel a subject off its background.

Retouching tools

• Spot Healing Brush (J) — one-click blemish removal; Content-Aware, Create Texture or Proximity Match types.
• Healing Brush — like Clone Stamp but blends the patch with surrounding tone. Alt/Option-click to set the source. The Patch tool drags a selection to its replacement area.
• Clone Stamp (S) — exact pixel copying: Alt/Option-click to set the source, then paint. Aligned mode and a Sample menu (current layer or all layers) in the options bar; the Clone Source panel gives precise offsets.
• Blur / Sharpen / Smudge (R) and Dodge / Burn / Sponge (O) — classic local adjustments, painted on.
• History Brush (Y) — paints an earlier history state back into the image.

Vector, type & crop

• Shapes (U) — rectangles, rounded rectangles, ellipses, polygons, lines and custom shapes as editable shape layers with fill and stroke (solid or dashed) plus boolean combine operations.
• Pen (P) — full path editing: standard, freeform and curvature pens, anchor-point tools, and a combined Paths tool. Finished paths can become a selection, a mask or a shape. Enter commits a path, Esc cancels.
• Type (T) — horizontal and vertical text with font family/style, size, color, alignment, anti-alias modes and Warp Text. Type Mask variants create a selection in the shape of the text. Character, Paragraph and Glyphs panels carry the fine controls.
• Crop (C) — ratio presets (1:1, 4:5, 16:9 and friends), rule-of-thirds or grid overlays, a Straighten mode, and the choice to delete or keep cropped pixels. The Perspective Crop tool squares up skewed photos.

Navigation

• Hand (H) pans — or just hold Space with any tool. Rotate View spins the canvas non-destructively; double-click the button to reset.
• Zoom (Z) — click to zoom in, Alt/Option-click out, with Scrubby Zoom dragging. Double-click the Zoom button for 100%, the Hand button to fit the screen.
• The Eyedropper (I) samples colors; the Color Sampler pins up to several persistent readouts in the Info panel; Ruler, Count and Note round out the group.