Monday, August 4, 2008
Rectangular and Elliptical Tools
I updated the Basic Tools section to include the Rectangular and Elliptical Tools.
Friday, June 20, 2008
Will Continue Posting Soon
Hey all, sorry for the lack of recent updates. Finals week was pretty stressful and I am currently on a 3 week term abroad in Florence, Italy. I will continue updating when I return home, sometime shortly after July 1st.
Monday, May 26, 2008
Selection Tools
I have updated the Basic Tools section to include a section on selection tools! Check it out. I have started with the Move Tool.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Layers
I have updated the Basic Tools section to include Layers. I decided to hold off on writing the Vector Tools section as they are more advanced tools which require a better knowledge of the program. Unless of course there is a demand for guides on Vector Tools...
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
4. Vector Tools
a. Raster and Vector
Photoshop is primarily a raster drawing program, but due to popular demand it has included some basic vector tools. A raster object is one that is made of pixels. If you were to zoom all the way in to a raster image, you would be able to see the enlarged pixels that make up that image. Look below for an example of a raster object; in this case, the letter A.
A raster image is confined to those specific pixels. You can enlarge the letter digitally, but there will be no more information within the image. As you increase the size of the image, you lose quality.
A vector image is different. In mathematics a vector is (very basically) a line that is defined by an equation. Photoshop allows you to create lines that it defines by equations. When you create a vector image the lines that make up the edges of the shape can be increased digitally to whatever size you like without losing any quality. Take for example a basic paint program such as MS paint. When you use the circle tool you are using a vector to map out the edges of the circle. Once you draw the circle it has been turned into a raster image and cannot be enlarged without losing quality. In Photoshop you can do the same thing, but the program does not immediately convert it to a raster image, which allows you to freely edit the shapes you have created. To change a vector into a raster, which is appropriate for saving in JPEG format or printing on non-vector based printers move the cursor up to the top menu, click “Layer,” click “Rasterize,” and click the appropriate option you desire.
Photoshop is primarily a raster drawing program, but due to popular demand it has included some basic vector tools. A raster object is one that is made of pixels. If you were to zoom all the way in to a raster image, you would be able to see the enlarged pixels that make up that image. Look below for an example of a raster object; in this case, the letter A.
A raster image is confined to those specific pixels. You can enlarge the letter digitally, but there will be no more information within the image. As you increase the size of the image, you lose quality.
A vector image is different. In mathematics a vector is (very basically) a line that is defined by an equation. Photoshop allows you to create lines that it defines by equations. When you create a vector image the lines that make up the edges of the shape can be increased digitally to whatever size you like without losing any quality. Take for example a basic paint program such as MS paint. When you use the circle tool you are using a vector to map out the edges of the circle. Once you draw the circle it has been turned into a raster image and cannot be enlarged without losing quality. In Photoshop you can do the same thing, but the program does not immediately convert it to a raster image, which allows you to freely edit the shapes you have created. To change a vector into a raster, which is appropriate for saving in JPEG format or printing on non-vector based printers move the cursor up to the top menu, click “Layer,” click “Rasterize,” and click the appropriate option you desire.
Monday, May 19, 2008
Sunday, May 18, 2008
3. Basic Tools
Quick Jumps
a. Opening a New Image File
b. Paintbrush Tool
i. Selecting Color
ii. Changing Diameter and Hardness
iii. Changing Opacity and Flow
c. Eraser Tool
d. Burning and Dodging
e. Layers
f. Selection Tools
i. Move Tool
ii. Rectangular Marquee Tool
a. Opening a New Image File
To start working with we will need to open a new image document. This can be easily accomplished by moving your cursor to “File” in the top menu bar, clicking on it, and clicking “New…”
A window will pop up looking like this:
Some of your settings may be different from above if you opened this menu before and played with the options. For the sake of this tutorial, if they are different, change them to be identical to the ones shown above. For example, the menu next to width may read pixels, cm, mm, etc. Once your window looks identical to this one click on OK to create the canvas.
As a personal preference I like to click on the bottom right of the window and enlarge it so that I can see the edges of the canvas. This makes it easier for me to edit the edges of the image.
b. Paintbrush Tool
This is tool is the heart of drawing and painting in Photoshop. On the left look for an icon like this:
It will be the eighth tool down. Click on it, click on the canvas, drag your mouse, and release the button. Congratulations! You can now have the skills to use any item on the left bar. Some are more complicated than others, but they all work by the same mechanic.
i. Selecting Color
There are a number of different ways to select your working color in photoshop. This color selection tool is readily available at the top right of the screen.
There are three sliders change the amount of red, green, and blue in your working color. You can also type in numerical values ranging from 0-255 for precise color selection. Three zeroes will give you the blackest of black and three values of 255 will give you the whitest of white. A value of 255 for red will result in a bright red. Lowering this value will reduce the color's intensity. Alternatively, you can click on the palette below the three sliders to select your color. Try it for a little while. You will notice that every color in that spectrum has a specific value for red, green, or blue.
ii. Changing Diameter and Hardness
Once you are comfortable with drawing and selecting colors it is time to move on to the next step. Direct your eyes and cursor to the top menu. You will notice that when the paintbrush tool is selected the top tool specific menu will display options available for the paintbrush tool. It will look like this:
Ignore the “Mode” pull-down menu, and the airbrush looking icon on the right for the basic tutorials. The other four options available are the backbone of the paintbrush tool. First concern yourself with the “Brush” pull-down menu which will allow you to change the size, hardness, and shape of the paintbrush tool. Click on the menu and a window will appear.
The top two sliders will allow you to edit brushes selected from the grid below. The grid serves to help you switch between types of brushes quickly. As you scroll down the grid you will find many different types of brushes. You can take some time to play with them, as there are some very interesting ones, or you can continue with this tutorial. We will focus on only the circular brushes.
The “Master Diameter” is the size of the brush. It is listed in pixels. A pixel is a very small square that makes up everything on your display. To give you an idea, a good quality 17-inch monitor is capable of displaying up to 1.3 million pixels (1280 pixels by 1024 pixels). Drag the slider to the right and bring your cursor over your canvas and you will notice that the brush outline circle size has increased. If you can’t see the outline circle anymore, you have probably increased the size of the tool too much.
The hardness of the brush is a harder concept to grasp than the diameter, which is fairly straightforward. I will try to explain it as best I can. If you were to draw a line with a crayon, a pencil, and a pen on paper you will notice that as you go from crayon to pencil to pen the edge of the line gets harder and more defined. The program tries to simulate this effect by the hardness of the brush. With a hardness of zero percent the translucency of the line you draw will increase as you look further from the center of the line. With a hardness of 100% you will notice that the opacity of the line is steady throughout the line. Working with a softer brush is more forgiving than working with a harder brush. Play with the diameter and hardness until you are comfortable.
iii. Changing Opacity and Flow
Return your focus to the top tool specific menu and look for the options “Opacity” and “Flow” on the right.
Clicking on either of these will reveal a slider, which you can use to change the opacity. Alternatively you can type in your desired percentage. We will first work with opacity.
Opacity changes the level of translucency of the tool. Find a blank spot on your canvas and draw a line with the paintbrush tool, then change the opacity setting in the top menu to 30% and change the color of the tool to red. Draw a line through the one that you just put drew. You will notice that the black below bleeds through the red. This is the best way I can describe opacity.
The left vertical line is at 30% and the right vertical line is at 100% opacity.
Changing the opacity to 10% or lower will allow you to build up color and give an almost painted effect, which is fun to play with. Try it out, you can get some neat effects.
I am not entirely sure what causes the rings around the colors, but selecting the airbrush looking tool on the right of the top tool specific bar will mostly get rid of them. In later tutorials I will explain how to increase the size and the resolution of your images, which will also help reduce the ring effect.
Fill is more difficult of an option to explain than opacity. Imagine instead of drawing with a pencil, which you can press to a paper and drag to create a line, all you have is a round stamp which you have to keep pressing against a paper to create a line. This is how the program draws; it draws one circle at a time at a very, very fast rate. Fill changes this rate and allows you to increase the frequency with which the program draws circles. That is the technical explanation of what fill does, but it is much easier to understand its effects by playing with the fill slider and seeing how that affects the paintbrush tool.
The above was made with a brush with a hardness and opacity of 100%. From the top down the fill is 30%, 50%, and 100%. The effect is hard to see. Play with the fill settings yourself to get a good feel of how it works.
c. Eraser Tool
The eraser tool works almost exactly like the paintbrush tool, but instead of putting a color down, it erases that color.
There is one important feature about the eraser to note. If you change the background color at the bottom of the left panel, it will erase with that color. The paintbrush uses the foreground color.
The foreground color in the image above is orange and the background color is white. If you click the double ended arrow, the colors will reverse. If you click the black and white squares, Photoshop will return the settings to a black foreground and a white background.
d. Burning and Dodging
Burn Tool
Dodge tool
The burn tool should appear on the left bar originally by default settings. To change between the two tools, click and hold the burn tool icon until a menu pops up, then move the cursor to the dodge tool and select it.
These tools are at the heart of photography. When printing photographs from film a printmaker would lighten a certain area of a photograph by blocking the light that hits the photo paper. The ball and stick icon looks similar to the tool a photographer would use. To darken a certain area of a photograph the printmaker would cut a hole in a piece of board and expose controlled areas of the paper making them darker. I don’t know how to explain the burn tool icon. If someone has an explanation please leave a comment telling me, as I would like to know.
Photoshop has made the process of burning and dodging trivial with their tools. First allow me to explain the different options for these two tools. On the top tool specific bar there are two options that are different from those of the paintbrush tool.
The exposure is the strength of the burning or dodging, similar to opacity. The range refers to the tones you wish to target. Highlights are the lightest areas of the image. Light colors, or colors with a lot of white in them fall into this category. Midtones are in the middle. Regular colors will be targeted with this setting. Shadows are dark colors with a lot of black in them. The tool will only effect the range you select.
To use these tools properly you should open up a photograph and experiment with the tool. The best way to learn the use of these two tools is through practice and observation. Remember to keep the exposure low to start out with so that the changes you make are not too drastic. An outside observer should not be able to detect burning and dodging if it is done correctly (unless of course that is the look you were seeking to achieve). Keep in mind that proper burning and dodging is no easier than drawing and shading in Photoshop, and may take some time before you have mastered the technique. Later I will create a tutorial on the techniques of burning and dodging, but as of right now I will stick with explaining the basic tools and how they work.
e. Layers
I wasn’t sure where to place this section. It isn’t really a tool in Photoshop so much as a feature, but understanding how to work with layers is absolutely crucial. It is important to note that almost all images on the internet, such as JPEGs or GIFs, are flat images which do not contain layers, and that to preserve the work you have created, always save a copy of the work you wish to keep as a Photoshop document or .PSD file.
Think of a layer as exactly that, a layer. To put it into a real world perspective, imagine that you have completely transparent sheets of plastic that you can draw or paint on and move around freely without having to worry about smudge marks or scratches.
Go ahead and create two new layers. Move your mouse over to “Layer” on the top menu bar, select “New…”, and select layer and repeat. It is important to note that the new layers are completely transparent and the background layer is not. Many times I forget to add a new layer before working with the canvas, and then wish to extract something from that layer only to realize that I will be taking all of the white from the background with it.
Once you have created these new layers, look to the bottom of the right bar. It should look like this
Notice “Layer 1” and “Layer 2” above the background layer. The checkerboard pattern is what Photoshop uses to indicate transparency so that it is distinguishable from a completely white or completely gray layer. You can right click on the layers and select layer properties. The menu that comes up will allow you to change the name of the layers, which is important for organization.
One important thing I would like to show you how to do is rearrange layers. On “Layer 1” draw a horizontal red line with the Paintbrush tool, and then, on “Layer 2,” draw a vertical black line through the red one. The black line covers the red line up as shown below.
Now click on “Layer 2” in the bottom of the right bar and drag it in between “Layer 1” and the background layer.
Notice that on the canvas the red line crosses and covers up the black line.
Take some time to play around with layers, as they will be extremely useful in your future works. I cannot explain layers in their entirety here, as the whole program is designed to work with layers in different ways. This section serves only to introduce you to them. Your budding relationship will certainly be a fruitful one.
f. Selection Tools
There are many, many ways to select things in Photoshop. Here I will go over the basic selection tools located on the top of the left tool bar. They aren’t particularly exciting, but they important to learning Photoshop.
i. Move Tool
This is the simplest of the selection tools, but is one of the most useful. With this tool you can move anything that you can select on your canvas. If nothing is selected and you click on the canvas you will be able to move the active layer selected in the layers tab on the right bar. If instead of left clicking, you right click, you will be greeted with a quick pop up menu that lists all layers with information at that point.
Referring to the above picture, if you right click the area where the two lines cross you will be able to select either the red or the black layer. This is useful if you get lost in your layers.
The top menu has some interesting options available that you can use to quickly align or alter your selection. Open up a canvas, create a new layer, make a mark on that layer with the paintbrush, create another layer, and make different looking mark on that layer. You will now be able to use the alignment options if you select both layers at once by holding shift and clicking the two layers in the appropriate section in the right bar. Hover your cursor for a textual explanation of what each button does. You can align the pixels left, right, or center them with one another. For graphic designers this is a very quick way to position objects exactly.
If you click “Show Transform Controls,” shown above” you will notice a marquee with eight squares at the corners and in the middle. Use these tools as you would resize a window. You can enlarge your image, keeping the same aspect ratio by shift-clicking on the sizing squares. To rotate your selection click on the outside of the marquee and drag. Shift-clicking will allow you to constrain the rotation to 45 degree increments. I will go into more detail with this tool in later updates. To confirm you changes double click in the center of the selection or click the check box on the top tool specific bar (this is useful if you have a small selection).
ii. Rectangular Marquee Tool
Clicking and holding on this tool will bring up a menu that will allow you to select between the rectangular marquee tool, the elliptical marquee tool, and two tools which I quite honestly don't know how to use. (If someone would like a guide on how to use those two tools leave a comment and I will explore them further)
The rectangular and elliptical tools are very similar in their usage. Click on the tool, click and hold on the canvas and drag. This creates a selection that is essentially a quarantined piece of canvas. While selected you cannot edit anything outside the marquee.
There are two useful options in the top menu bar when the tool is selected. Click on "Normal" and a drop-down menu appears allowing you to select "Fixed Ratio" or "Fixed Size." With either of these selected you can input parameters directly to the right of the drop-down menu that allows you to specify the size of the square digitally.
There isn't much to this tool, it does what it does and that's about it. There are two important quick-keys with this tool. If you create a marquee, hold shift, and click and drag again on the canvas you will create an addition to your original marquee. Holding the ALT key will do the opposite, allowing you to subtract from your original marquee.
a. Opening a New Image File
b. Paintbrush Tool
i. Selecting Color
ii. Changing Diameter and Hardness
iii. Changing Opacity and Flow
c. Eraser Tool
d. Burning and Dodging
e. Layers
f. Selection Tools
i. Move Tool
ii. Rectangular Marquee Tool
a. Opening a New Image File
To start working with we will need to open a new image document. This can be easily accomplished by moving your cursor to “File” in the top menu bar, clicking on it, and clicking “New…”
A window will pop up looking like this:
Some of your settings may be different from above if you opened this menu before and played with the options. For the sake of this tutorial, if they are different, change them to be identical to the ones shown above. For example, the menu next to width may read pixels, cm, mm, etc. Once your window looks identical to this one click on OK to create the canvas.
As a personal preference I like to click on the bottom right of the window and enlarge it so that I can see the edges of the canvas. This makes it easier for me to edit the edges of the image.
b. Paintbrush Tool
This is tool is the heart of drawing and painting in Photoshop. On the left look for an icon like this:
It will be the eighth tool down. Click on it, click on the canvas, drag your mouse, and release the button. Congratulations! You can now have the skills to use any item on the left bar. Some are more complicated than others, but they all work by the same mechanic.
i. Selecting Color
There are a number of different ways to select your working color in photoshop. This color selection tool is readily available at the top right of the screen.
There are three sliders change the amount of red, green, and blue in your working color. You can also type in numerical values ranging from 0-255 for precise color selection. Three zeroes will give you the blackest of black and three values of 255 will give you the whitest of white. A value of 255 for red will result in a bright red. Lowering this value will reduce the color's intensity. Alternatively, you can click on the palette below the three sliders to select your color. Try it for a little while. You will notice that every color in that spectrum has a specific value for red, green, or blue.
ii. Changing Diameter and Hardness
Once you are comfortable with drawing and selecting colors it is time to move on to the next step. Direct your eyes and cursor to the top menu. You will notice that when the paintbrush tool is selected the top tool specific menu will display options available for the paintbrush tool. It will look like this:
Ignore the “Mode” pull-down menu, and the airbrush looking icon on the right for the basic tutorials. The other four options available are the backbone of the paintbrush tool. First concern yourself with the “Brush” pull-down menu which will allow you to change the size, hardness, and shape of the paintbrush tool. Click on the menu and a window will appear.
The top two sliders will allow you to edit brushes selected from the grid below. The grid serves to help you switch between types of brushes quickly. As you scroll down the grid you will find many different types of brushes. You can take some time to play with them, as there are some very interesting ones, or you can continue with this tutorial. We will focus on only the circular brushes.
The “Master Diameter” is the size of the brush. It is listed in pixels. A pixel is a very small square that makes up everything on your display. To give you an idea, a good quality 17-inch monitor is capable of displaying up to 1.3 million pixels (1280 pixels by 1024 pixels). Drag the slider to the right and bring your cursor over your canvas and you will notice that the brush outline circle size has increased. If you can’t see the outline circle anymore, you have probably increased the size of the tool too much.
The hardness of the brush is a harder concept to grasp than the diameter, which is fairly straightforward. I will try to explain it as best I can. If you were to draw a line with a crayon, a pencil, and a pen on paper you will notice that as you go from crayon to pencil to pen the edge of the line gets harder and more defined. The program tries to simulate this effect by the hardness of the brush. With a hardness of zero percent the translucency of the line you draw will increase as you look further from the center of the line. With a hardness of 100% you will notice that the opacity of the line is steady throughout the line. Working with a softer brush is more forgiving than working with a harder brush. Play with the diameter and hardness until you are comfortable.
iii. Changing Opacity and Flow
Return your focus to the top tool specific menu and look for the options “Opacity” and “Flow” on the right.
Clicking on either of these will reveal a slider, which you can use to change the opacity. Alternatively you can type in your desired percentage. We will first work with opacity.
Opacity changes the level of translucency of the tool. Find a blank spot on your canvas and draw a line with the paintbrush tool, then change the opacity setting in the top menu to 30% and change the color of the tool to red. Draw a line through the one that you just put drew. You will notice that the black below bleeds through the red. This is the best way I can describe opacity.
The left vertical line is at 30% and the right vertical line is at 100% opacity.
Changing the opacity to 10% or lower will allow you to build up color and give an almost painted effect, which is fun to play with. Try it out, you can get some neat effects.
I am not entirely sure what causes the rings around the colors, but selecting the airbrush looking tool on the right of the top tool specific bar will mostly get rid of them. In later tutorials I will explain how to increase the size and the resolution of your images, which will also help reduce the ring effect.
Fill is more difficult of an option to explain than opacity. Imagine instead of drawing with a pencil, which you can press to a paper and drag to create a line, all you have is a round stamp which you have to keep pressing against a paper to create a line. This is how the program draws; it draws one circle at a time at a very, very fast rate. Fill changes this rate and allows you to increase the frequency with which the program draws circles. That is the technical explanation of what fill does, but it is much easier to understand its effects by playing with the fill slider and seeing how that affects the paintbrush tool.
The above was made with a brush with a hardness and opacity of 100%. From the top down the fill is 30%, 50%, and 100%. The effect is hard to see. Play with the fill settings yourself to get a good feel of how it works.
c. Eraser Tool
The eraser tool works almost exactly like the paintbrush tool, but instead of putting a color down, it erases that color.
There is one important feature about the eraser to note. If you change the background color at the bottom of the left panel, it will erase with that color. The paintbrush uses the foreground color.
The foreground color in the image above is orange and the background color is white. If you click the double ended arrow, the colors will reverse. If you click the black and white squares, Photoshop will return the settings to a black foreground and a white background.
d. Burning and Dodging
Burn Tool
Dodge toolThe burn tool should appear on the left bar originally by default settings. To change between the two tools, click and hold the burn tool icon until a menu pops up, then move the cursor to the dodge tool and select it.
These tools are at the heart of photography. When printing photographs from film a printmaker would lighten a certain area of a photograph by blocking the light that hits the photo paper. The ball and stick icon looks similar to the tool a photographer would use. To darken a certain area of a photograph the printmaker would cut a hole in a piece of board and expose controlled areas of the paper making them darker. I don’t know how to explain the burn tool icon. If someone has an explanation please leave a comment telling me, as I would like to know.
Photoshop has made the process of burning and dodging trivial with their tools. First allow me to explain the different options for these two tools. On the top tool specific bar there are two options that are different from those of the paintbrush tool.
The exposure is the strength of the burning or dodging, similar to opacity. The range refers to the tones you wish to target. Highlights are the lightest areas of the image. Light colors, or colors with a lot of white in them fall into this category. Midtones are in the middle. Regular colors will be targeted with this setting. Shadows are dark colors with a lot of black in them. The tool will only effect the range you select.
To use these tools properly you should open up a photograph and experiment with the tool. The best way to learn the use of these two tools is through practice and observation. Remember to keep the exposure low to start out with so that the changes you make are not too drastic. An outside observer should not be able to detect burning and dodging if it is done correctly (unless of course that is the look you were seeking to achieve). Keep in mind that proper burning and dodging is no easier than drawing and shading in Photoshop, and may take some time before you have mastered the technique. Later I will create a tutorial on the techniques of burning and dodging, but as of right now I will stick with explaining the basic tools and how they work.
e. Layers
I wasn’t sure where to place this section. It isn’t really a tool in Photoshop so much as a feature, but understanding how to work with layers is absolutely crucial. It is important to note that almost all images on the internet, such as JPEGs or GIFs, are flat images which do not contain layers, and that to preserve the work you have created, always save a copy of the work you wish to keep as a Photoshop document or .PSD file.
Think of a layer as exactly that, a layer. To put it into a real world perspective, imagine that you have completely transparent sheets of plastic that you can draw or paint on and move around freely without having to worry about smudge marks or scratches.
Go ahead and create two new layers. Move your mouse over to “Layer” on the top menu bar, select “New…”, and select layer and repeat. It is important to note that the new layers are completely transparent and the background layer is not. Many times I forget to add a new layer before working with the canvas, and then wish to extract something from that layer only to realize that I will be taking all of the white from the background with it.
Once you have created these new layers, look to the bottom of the right bar. It should look like this
Notice “Layer 1” and “Layer 2” above the background layer. The checkerboard pattern is what Photoshop uses to indicate transparency so that it is distinguishable from a completely white or completely gray layer. You can right click on the layers and select layer properties. The menu that comes up will allow you to change the name of the layers, which is important for organization.
One important thing I would like to show you how to do is rearrange layers. On “Layer 1” draw a horizontal red line with the Paintbrush tool, and then, on “Layer 2,” draw a vertical black line through the red one. The black line covers the red line up as shown below.
Now click on “Layer 2” in the bottom of the right bar and drag it in between “Layer 1” and the background layer.
Notice that on the canvas the red line crosses and covers up the black line.
Take some time to play around with layers, as they will be extremely useful in your future works. I cannot explain layers in their entirety here, as the whole program is designed to work with layers in different ways. This section serves only to introduce you to them. Your budding relationship will certainly be a fruitful one.
f. Selection Tools
There are many, many ways to select things in Photoshop. Here I will go over the basic selection tools located on the top of the left tool bar. They aren’t particularly exciting, but they important to learning Photoshop.
i. Move Tool
This is the simplest of the selection tools, but is one of the most useful. With this tool you can move anything that you can select on your canvas. If nothing is selected and you click on the canvas you will be able to move the active layer selected in the layers tab on the right bar. If instead of left clicking, you right click, you will be greeted with a quick pop up menu that lists all layers with information at that point.
Referring to the above picture, if you right click the area where the two lines cross you will be able to select either the red or the black layer. This is useful if you get lost in your layers.
The top menu has some interesting options available that you can use to quickly align or alter your selection. Open up a canvas, create a new layer, make a mark on that layer with the paintbrush, create another layer, and make different looking mark on that layer. You will now be able to use the alignment options if you select both layers at once by holding shift and clicking the two layers in the appropriate section in the right bar. Hover your cursor for a textual explanation of what each button does. You can align the pixels left, right, or center them with one another. For graphic designers this is a very quick way to position objects exactly.
If you click “Show Transform Controls,” shown above” you will notice a marquee with eight squares at the corners and in the middle. Use these tools as you would resize a window. You can enlarge your image, keeping the same aspect ratio by shift-clicking on the sizing squares. To rotate your selection click on the outside of the marquee and drag. Shift-clicking will allow you to constrain the rotation to 45 degree increments. I will go into more detail with this tool in later updates. To confirm you changes double click in the center of the selection or click the check box on the top tool specific bar (this is useful if you have a small selection).
ii. Rectangular Marquee Tool
Clicking and holding on this tool will bring up a menu that will allow you to select between the rectangular marquee tool, the elliptical marquee tool, and two tools which I quite honestly don't know how to use. (If someone would like a guide on how to use those two tools leave a comment and I will explore them further)
The rectangular and elliptical tools are very similar in their usage. Click on the tool, click and hold on the canvas and drag. This creates a selection that is essentially a quarantined piece of canvas. While selected you cannot edit anything outside the marquee.
There are two useful options in the top menu bar when the tool is selected. Click on "Normal" and a drop-down menu appears allowing you to select "Fixed Ratio" or "Fixed Size." With either of these selected you can input parameters directly to the right of the drop-down menu that allows you to specify the size of the square digitally.
There isn't much to this tool, it does what it does and that's about it. There are two important quick-keys with this tool. If you create a marquee, hold shift, and click and drag again on the canvas you will create an addition to your original marquee. Holding the ALT key will do the opposite, allowing you to subtract from your original marquee.
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