Adobe Photoshop CS5 One-on-One

The Three Editing Styles

Photoshop lets you use the tools in the second section of the tool-
box to apply and modify colors in three ways:

• The painting tools—the brush, the paint bucket, and others—
  permit you to paint lines and fill shapes with the foreground
  color. I drew the lines in Figure 4-2 with the brush while switch-
  ing the foreground color between black and white.


• Editing tools is a catchall category for any tool that modifies
  rather than replaces the existing color or luminosity of a pixel.
  The burn tool darkens pixels, the smudge tool smears them,
  and the color replacement tool swaps hue and saturation values,
  as demonstrated in Figure 4-3.


• The healing tools—the healing brush, patch tool, and history
  brush among them—permit you to clone elements from one
  portion or state of an image to another. The history brush clones
  pixels from an older version of the image. The healing brush
  and patch tool go a step better, merging the cloned details with
  their new background to create a gradual or seamless match,
  as illustrated in Figure 4-4.

The frequent recurrence of the word brushes may lead you to think
that these tools are best suited to creating original artwork. Although
many people create artwork from scratch in Photoshop, it’s not re-
ally what the program’s designers had in mind. The real purpose
of these tools is to help you edit photographic images, and that’s
how we’ll use them in this lesson.

PeaRl Of WISDOm

The brush-based tools rely on Photoshop’s brush engine. A single dollop of
paint—the “brush” itself—is repeated over and over with such rapidity that
Photoshop appears to be painting a smooth line. The options bar lets you
control the size and shape of the brush; the exhaustive Brushes panel offers
additional attributes. I introduce you to both in Video Lesson 4, “Brushes and
Painting” (as explained on the opposite page).

The Tone-Editing Tools

When I use the term editing, I mean using Photoshop’s tools to
modify the colors, luminance levels, and color transitions in a pho-
tographic image.

Figure 4-2.

Figure 4-3.

Figure 4-4.

The Tone-Editing Tools 95