Adobe Photoshop Elements Tutorial - Tools and Icons in Adobe Photoshop Elements - Including Zoom, Marquee, Lasso and Magic Wand
Move, Zoom, and the Hand Tool
Move Tool: The move tool will allow you to move the layer to wherever you’d like to place it. It will not work if there is only one layer.
Zoom Tool: The zoom tool allows you to zoom in or zoom out on a photo. This helps when you are trying to select a specific part of the photo. You can zoom in to make sure you have all of the pixels selected, or zoom out to see how the photo looks as a whole after you’ve made changes.
Hand Tool: The hand tool allows you to pan the photo. You can pan left, right, up, or down. This helps when you are zoomed in so that you can pan, rather than having to zoom in and out to view specific areas of a photo.
Move, Zoom, and Hand Icons
The Eyedropper and Marquees
Eyedropper Tool: The eyedropper tool allows you to choose a specific color from within the photo. This comes in handy when you want to color a photo and allow it to blend in with the rest of the photograph. You can make sure both colors match perfectly, rather than trying to guess at the combination of colors.
Rectangular Marquee Tool: The rectangular marquee tool allows you to select a part of the photograph in the shape of a rectangle.
Elliptical Marquee Tool: The elliptical marquee tool can be found by right clicking on the rectangular marquee icon. This allows you to select a part of your photo in the shape of a circle or oval.
Eyedropper and Marqee Icons
Lassos and the Magic Wand
Lasso Tool: The lasso allows you to select a part of the photograph freehand. Once both parts of the selection have intersected, that part of the photo will be selected.
Magnetic Lasso Tool: The magnetic lasso tool works very well with photos that have high contrast. It will act as a magnet to outline pixels that match the color of what you are selecting. The magnetic lasso is found by right-clicking the Lasso tool icon.
Polygonal Lasso Tool: The polygonal lasso allows you to select a part of the image using straight lines in whatever shape you’d like. This works well if you have a specific shape in mind, or if there are lots of geometric shapes in the photo. The polygonal lasso is also found by right-clicking the Lasso tool icon.
Magic Wand Tool: The magic wand tool is used to select pixels that are the same color. You can set it’s tolerance (how “off-color” the pixels should be for the wand to still select them) using the top bar of your screen.
Lassos and Magic Wand Icons
This post is part of the series: Tools in Adobe Photoshop Elements 6.0
If you’re just getting started with editing photographs using Adobe Photoshop Elements, you may be overwhelmed with all of the different buttons and options you have. This article series will explain the different menus, buttons, and other options that will help you to use Photoshop Elements.
- Tools and Icons in Adobe Photoshop Elements - Including Zoom, Marquee, Lasso and Magic Wand
- Tools and Icons in Adobe Photoshop Elements - Including Selection, Mask, Red Eye Removal, Healing and Stamp
- Tools and Icons in Adobe Photoshop Elements - Including Erasers, Brushes, Gradient and Shapes
- Tools and Icons in Adobe Photoshop Elements - Including Smudge, Blur, Sharpen, Dodge and Burn
