The Basics
The Tools Window:
Okay, you should see the tools palette on the screen. If you don't, it can be found
in the menus (Window > Show Tools). These are the tools you use to edit the current
layer. Also, you should know that any tool that has a little arrow in the lower right
corner of its box has more than one mode. You can click and hold over it to see all its
modes.
In the tools window,
you will notice that the tools are in separate divisions. The top four are tools for
selecting areas. When an area is selected, it is shown as a rotating black and white
dashed outline. Any actions you do only affect the selected area. Areas can be
deselected in the menus (Select > Deselect) or with the keyboard (Ctrl+D). Here's what
these tools do:
- Marquee: Selects an area in a standard shape, such as a circle or square.
- Move: Not a selection tool. Allows you to pick up and move selected contents.
- Lasso: Either a freehand or polygon lasso, good for "drawing" your selection.
- Magic Wand: This tool is good for selecting large blocks of solid color.
The next batch are the freehand drawing tools. Some of these tools do not work like
their namesakes!
- Airbrush: Good for soft shading, works pretty much like a real airbrush.
- Paintbrush: Draws anti-aliased lines. This means that if you draw black on a
white background with this tool, some of the pixels that lie on the edge of the line
will be shades of gray, to make the line look smoother.
- Eraser: Can mimic most of the other drawing tools, but turns the edited area
transparent instead of colored.
- Pencil: Draws aliased lines. A black on white line drawn with this tool will
only contain purely black and purely white pixels. Can make things look jagged if
used improperly.
The other freehand drawing tools are useful in their own way, but are not needed for this
tutorial. The next batch are computer-assisted drawing tools. Most of these are fairly
self-explanatory, except for the pen tools, but they are explained in the
Pen Tools inking style page.
The two tools below that are for panning and zooming around the picture. I tend to use
the keyboard shortcuts instead. Holding down space and dragging with the mouse can
pan around the picture, and zooming in and out is done with Ctrl+Plus and Ctrl+Minus.
The panel below that shows two overlapping colored squares. The one on top is the
foreground color, which is the color which all the drawing tools use. The one in
the rear is the background color, which is the color that the eraser uses on a layer
that cannot be transparent. These colors can be changed by clicking on them (see below
for more info on the color picker). The icon
above and to the right of these squares exchanges the foreground and background colors.
The one in the opposite corner restores them to Black on White.
Below that is another tool for selection and editing. These are Standard editing mode
and Mask editing mode. You'll usually want to keep this in Standard editing mode, where
the drawing tools affect the current layer. In Mask mode, the drawing tools draw on a
red overlay, which becomes the selection when you change back to Standard mode.
Below this are the window modes. With these you can make the image you're working on
appear in its own window, or fullscreen. I usually keep it in its own window.
The Options Window:
Another window you'll need to have handy when drawing is the Options Window
(Window > Show Options). This window looks different depending on which tool you
select, and has all the options and modes of the tool spelled out.
The Brushes Window:
Another good window to have is the Brushes window. Here you can select what size brush
the selected tool uses, which controls how thick the lines drawn with the drawing tools
are. Double-clicking on one of the shown brushes allows you to edit it, where you can
give the brush custom properties, which are all fairly self-explanatory, since as you
adjust them, a preview updates itself.
The History Window
This window (only in version 5) allows you to undo more than one action. The list
in the window shows the recent actions you've taken, the most recent on the bottom.
Clicking on previous steps undoes any actions done since that step. For users of
version 4 and below, only the most recent action can be undone, with the Undo command
(Edit > Undo or Ctrl+Z).
The Color Picker:

Above is the color picker mentioned before. You may be familiar with the concept of
a Color Cube, which is that since any color can be made from three variables (such
as Red, Green, and Blue, or Hue, Saturation, and Brightness) they can all be put into
a three-dimensional graph. Well, of course since we don't have 3D displays, and even
if we did, it would be impossible to see the insides of this cube all at once, we see
a cross-section. In the image above, the large square of color ranges in saturation
horizontally, and brightness vertically. The other variable, the depth of the cross
section, in this case the Hue, is seen in the bar to its right, in this case green. You
can change which variable is in the cross-section and which system the cube represents
by clicking the buttons next to the values. H/S/V and R/G/B are the two systems I
mentioned earlier. C/Y/M/K are not selectable because their four variables are too many
to show as a cube. L/a/b color is an old system of describing color, based on how
color for television signals is broadcast.