How to Use Expert Mode Tools in Photoshop Elements 2019
Watch the Adobe Photoshop Elements 2019 video training tutorial below. We will cover editing in expert mode and we will take a closer look at toolbox and options such as the View, Select, Enhance, Modify, Draw and Color tools. We will show you how to show and hide tool options as well as resetting them.
Welcome back to our course on PSE 2019. In this chapter, we’re returning to the Editor and we’re going to look at some more tools and techniques in Expert mode. Two key sets of tools and techniques associated with selection and layers are going to come up later on in the course.
I’m concentrating on some pretty basic aspects of using Expert mode still at the moment. If you’re familiar with Expert mode editing from a relatively recent version of PSE you can probably skip the whole of this chapter.
First of all, we’re going to talk about using the Toolbox. I’m going to explain some of the tools groupings. Then, we’re going to look at foreground and background colors, a couple of other aspects of showing and hiding tool options. And finally, I’ll show you how to reset tools.
When working in Expert mode, the Toolbox has the most tools in it. Although you can see quite a few tools there, you may remember from one of the sections on Quick mode that each tool can actually correspond to multiple tools.
Let me go to this particular tool here which currently says Auto-Selection (A). The A is important because if I select that tool you’ll see that it actually corresponds to five different tools.
In Quick mode that particular tool which was the Quick Selection tool corresponded to four tools. You get even more in Expert mode.
If I press the letter A on the keyboard, it cycles me through all of those selection tools. Let me hover over the tool beneath it in the toolbox.
That’s the Spot Healing Brush tool. I haven’t clicked that but if I press J on the keyboard now, that takes me to the Spot Healing Brush. I can cycle through those.
So, if you like using keyboard shortcuts, you can use the letters to take you around the toolbox. So, that you don’t have to keep going over there with your mouse or other pointing devices. That’s a pretty slick way of locating a particular tool in the toolbox.
The tools in the toolbox are arranged into a number of groups or categories. Starting at the top we have a View group, which includes the Zoom tool and the Hand tool.
We then have the Select group, which contains a number of different tools for making selections. We’ve done a little bit of selection already but we’ll be doing a lot more later on in the course.
We then have the Enhance group. Many of the tools in the Enhance group are associated normally with correcting problems, such as removing red eye or improving the lighting in an image.
We then have the Draw group. Whereby we can draw on an image or even create an image from scratch. Note, that the Draw group includes tools for adding text to an image.
We then have the Modify group. In this group, we have the tools whereby we can modify the structure of an image. This includes things like cropping but also contains some tools we can use to remove objects from an image.
Below that, we have a Color group. We can use the controls here to select foreground and background colors.
Let me just explain one or two things about those color controls. The two panels there correspond to the current foreground color and the current background color.
If I hover over that one that’s the foreground color and this one is the background color; you can switch them using this double-headed arrow here.
And if you change one of the colors, let’s suppose you clicked on that white and changed the color say to a deep red, you can always revert back to black and white again by using the little control in the bottom left corner there. The default foreground and background colors.
Now, whichever is the foreground color will be used by certain tools. So if I, for instance, use a brush tool, let’s have quite a big brush and I brush on an image the brushing will be done in the current foreground color, which is black. If I switch those, use the brush again, it’ll be white.
That’s the significance of the foreground and background colors. And we’ll be using those quite a bit from now on.
Something that I showed you earlier on was how to show and hide the tool options. And if I hide the tool options here, I’ll no longer see the options for the currently selected brush tool. But if I select a different tool, let’s suppose I select that tool, automatically the tool options appear again.
That’s supposed to be helpful but it can be a little bit annoying if you don’t want to use the tool options.
You can suppress that behavior using a little option on this mini menu at the righthand end of the Tool Options panel. And at the moment, you can see Auto Show Tool Options is checked.
If I uncheck that and hide the Tool Options and change them too, I no longer automatically see the Tool Options for the newly selected tool. Of course, I can still open it manually if I want to I can check back on Auto Show Tool Options.
And something else that you may well want to do at some stage, let’s suppose you’ve been using a tool, say the Brush tool.
You’ve selected a different brush for some reason and you’ve changed the size of the brush and so on. At any time if you want to reset that particular tool to its default settings, if you go back to that little mini menu again in the Tool Options panel, there is an option Reset Tool which puts the brush and the size back to the default settings.
In fact in, that same menu there is a Reset All Tools option which will reset all tool options for all the tools. So they’re worth knowing about as well.
That’s the end of this section. I’ll see you in the next one.
Adam Lacey
Adam Lacey is an Excel enthusiast and online learning expert. He combines these two passions at Simon Sez IT where he wears a number of different hats.When Adam isn't fretting about site traffic or Pivot Tables, you'll find him on the tennis court or in the kitchen cooking up a storm.
