Skip to main content

Finding Hidden Tools

Lesson 11 from: Photoshop for Beginners: Essential Training

Mark Wallace

buy this class

$00

$00
Sale Ends Soon!

starting under

$13/month*

Unlock this classplus 2200+ more >

Lesson Info

11. Finding Hidden Tools

There are tools and panels hidden everywhere in Photoshop. Mark explains the disclosure triangle and explains how to find all the hidden tools and panels in Photoshop.

Lessons

Class Trailer
1

Class Introduction

00:52
2

Introducing Photoshop

02:37
3

The Class Materials

01:36
4

How To Open Files

01:42
5

Using The Home Screen

02:35
6

Exploring The Interface

03:30
7

Getting Additional Help

01:36
8

Understanding Workspaces

05:11

Lesson Info

Finding Hidden Tools

let's take a closer look at that toolbar because you might have noticed that next to each of the tools for most of the tools, there's a little triangle there, that's a disclosure triangle. And that shows shows us a bunch of hidden tools. So let me just go and zoom in really fast on these tools here and you can see that some of them, most of them have a little triangle next to it. That's called a disclosure triangle. What that does is if you click the tool and hold down the mouse or the pen, you will see extra tools. These are tools that are hidden. The reason that they're not all out there is because then the toolbar would be so big that you would just have no room for anything else. And so any tool that has a little triangle, it means that if you click and hold, you'll see more tools pop out. Those are the hidden tools. They're also notice that on the right hand side there is a little letter there. So this one says w if I click and hold this one, it says l I click this one, it says M ...

that is the shortcut key. And so you can go through the different tools by clicking the shortcut key. So let me show you that. So let's go here to this run right here. We've got three different tools. So if I am on this and I hit w that tool shows up, I want to get to the next tool and this little menu here. Either I can click and hold and select it. Or what I can do is if I hit shift w it goes to the next tool shift w it goes to the next tool shift. W so it cycles through that by hitting the shortcut key and then whatever the last tool is that you selected. If you just hit the shortcut key, that's what it goes to. So let me show you that again. So I've got let's say the magic wand tool and then I hit shift w now I've got the selection tool. If I go up here to this tool right here and now I hit w it goes back to the last tool that I selected. So all of these tools over here have almost all of them have different hidden tools and a shortcut key that's associated with that. This one doesn't have a little disclosure triangle. So it's just one tool. So let me zoom out really fast. So take a closer look on your computer, you'll see all these different tools that have multiple tools underneath them. Those are the hidden tools. The other thing that we have at the very bottom of the screen here, there's this little ellipsis here. If I click that and then click edit toolbar, you can customize the tools that show up in your toolbar. And so perhaps there are some tools that you don't ever want to use. So maybe I'm never using the single marquee tool or this tool right here. Or maybe I don't need the perspective crop tool, I don't know any three D. Stuff. I'm not gonna do the count tool, I'm not a scientist, I don't need you know whatever I don't need this tool you can say okay done and those tools we removed from your toolbar, if there's some tools here that I talked about that you don't see then you can click on this and then you might see them pop up here. So the hidden tools then show up here or you can edit the toolbar and you can bring those back and put them wherever you want. Or you can just say restore defaults and restore the toolbar to the default way it behaves. And so you can totally customize the tools that you see now. The other thing that's interesting when Photoshop here. So just like the tools, if you click them and hold them, you see what the shortcut key is. The same thing is true of the menu items. And so if you want to know how to open something you can see up here that right next to open is command or control. Oh if you're on a pc and through all of these different menus, anything that has a shortcut key associated with it, it will show up and so you can see if I want to create a new layer and make it a copy. I can just hit command J or if I want to do a new layer, I can hit shift command in. And so all of those different shortcut keys will show up there later. I'm gonna show you how to use shortcut keys and how to customize them for your own use. Alright. So to really start using all of this stuff in Photoshop, we have to start working on an image and that's what we're gonna do next. We're gonna learn how to navigate an image so we can zoom in and zoom out and rotate and do all the things we need to do to start having some fun, I don't know.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Workbook
Class Materials

Ratings and Reviews

Katie
 

Mark did a great job at explaining things and going over them multiple times throughout the lessons. My only issue was that sometimes it went a little faster than I could keep up and I needed to rewind it a bit and start again. But from someone who has never worked in photoshop before I 100% recommend this class to anyone trying to learn.

Terri Schwartz
 

Student Work

RELATED ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES