The toolbar you see to the left is probably the most important thing to know in Photoshop. It is what you use to create anything and everything. The tools that you need to know to get started are highlighted and we will talk about each one on this page.

There are lots of tools, and most of them also expand to show more tools underneath them. To do this, click down on a tool with a small arrow such as the pencil tool, hold, and drag to the right. This will give you a few more tools, usually variations of the tool you expanded.

To show you most of these tools you'll need to have a new file open. To do this go to the "File" menu and pick "New..." The only thing you need to worry about in this window is the height and width of the new image. If you set both to 400 pixels it should work best.

Now that you have a new file, let's try out some tools. The first of the tools is the Selection tool: . This is the tool you use when you want to select anything. Most filters require you to select something, this tool is a simple selecting tool. Pick it and draw a square. That selected the square you see with the lines going around it. You can hold this tool down and drag to the right and you will get other selecting tools such as the circle.

The next tool in the palette is the Move tool: . This tool will move the selection that you just made, if it's still selected, or if nothing is selected it will move the entire layer (more on layers later). There aren't anymore tools underneath this one (notice there's no arrows).

The next tool is the Lasso tool: . This tool is a lot like the Selection tool, however when you draw with it you don't automatically draw a shape, you hand draw with it instead. This makes for much more accurate selection techniques and generally selects things better than the regular Select tool. You can also use this tool with most filters.

The next tool we've selected is the Magic Wand tool: . This tool is indeed magical, it uses colors to select whole objects. This can save you a lot of time. You'll need to have a file open before you can try and select something with this tool. When you select with it, it will generally get close to what you want, but you can fine tune it with the Lasso and Selection tool by using the Shift key to add pixels and the Option key to take away (Shift and Alt in the Windows version).

The next tool is the Airbrush tool: . The airbrush tool works just like a real airbrush and can be fine tuned in the tool palettes that we'll talk about on the next page.

The Brush tool is one of the most used tools in the Photoshop: . There are different brushes in the tool palette that you can use that we'll talk about in the next page. You can control-click or right click in Windows and see a small menu of brush commands.

Next in line is the Eraser tool: . This tool takes away anything that you have drawn in the current layer (more on layers later) and exposes the next layer in line.

The Pencil tool: is basically the same as the brush tool, however it draws hard edges instead of soft edges like a pencil would.

The Text tool: does exactly what it's name suggests, it puts in text. It creates a new layer automatically for the new text that you enter.

The Paint Bucket tool: fills areas by color with the foreground color you have selected. This makes jobs like coloring objects very easy, especially since you can find tune how far to go (tolerance level) in its Option tool palette explained on the next page.

The Eye Dropper tool: takes the color you select from the screen and makes it the foreground color. This is handy when you are coping an image or see a color you like and would like to use it in another image.

The Zoom tool: allows you to zoom in up to 1600% or zoom out almost infinitely. Zooming in to levels like 1600% allows you to edit a graphic pixel by pixel, which can really help if you are cleaning an image up or need to do other very detailed work.

The colors part of the tools allows you to change the foreground and background color that the program is currently using. These colors are used for anything and everything. If you click on either of them you can change them with the color picker or pick a premade color out of the color books that are built-in. Now onto the next part of the tutorial which will show you how to use the tool palettes (on the right side of the screen) to optimize and customize all of the tools we've just seen.