Every tool in the toolbar

Toolbar: 16 cells, 57 tools

See the structure first

The toolbar on the left has 16 cells. Five hold a single tool; the other 11 carry a small

orange triangle in the corner — click that triangle (or press and hold) to open a whole group.

How many in each group

Selections (6): rectangular, elliptical, lasso, magic wand, magnetic lasso, polygonal lasso

Shapes (10): rectangle, rounded rectangle, ellipse, triangle, hexagon, polygon, star, line, pen, hand-drawn emphasis

Buckets / gradient (8): bucket, gradient, crayon, pencil, watercolour, ink, gradient crayon, gradient watercolour

Erasers (4): eraser, soft-edge eraser, smart speck eraser, smart repair

Retouch (8): fine blur, wide blur, blend, dodge, burn, sharpen, saturate, desaturate

Text 3, annotation 4, vector brushes 2, clone (A/B) 2, direct select 2, local effects 3

Five with no flyout: move, pan, pixel brush, crop, screen eyedropper

Hovering any cell shows its name and shortcut. The letter in brackets (R, E, A, L, M, G) is the key

Move, pan and the screen eyedropper

1. Move (V)

Click to select whatever you clicked; drag to move it. It selects the layer under the cursor

automatically, so you never have to hunt for it in the layer panel. Click empty space to deselect.

2. Pan (H)

Moves your view only — nothing in the image changes. Hold Space to pan temporarily; releasing returns you to the previous tool.

3. Screen eyedropper

Click anywhere on screen to read one pixel's colour, and it goes straight to the foreground or the selected element.

The eyedropper reads a single pixel with no averaging. On gradients or noisy areas, one pixel makes a big difference

Do not use it on thumbnails or other windows. It reads real screen pixels, so a zoomed view gives you the displayed value, not the original

Shape group: drawing all ten shapes

Three keys while drawing

Hold Shift: square / perfect circle / equilateral triangle, and lines snap to multiples of 15 degrees

Hold Alt: draw outward from the centre instead of from a corner

Afterwards, tune it in the property panel: fill colour, stroke colour, stroke width, corner radius, opacity

Filled by default: the fill follows the foreground colour in the top bar — pick a new colour and the next shape fills with it;

drag the fill slider to 0 (or right-click the fill swatch) to go back to outline-only

Notes on each of the ten

Rounded rectangle: the corner radius is its own control. Use it for buttons and card backgrounds

Polygon: click point by point, then click back on the start point to close

Star: both the number of points and the inner radius ratio are adjustable — good for rating stars and badges

Pen: click to add an anchor, drag to pull out a curve, then click the start point or double-click to finish

Hand-drawn emphasis: drag an ellipse, and on release it becomes a hand-drawn-looking circle —

better than a shaky hand-drawn oval when marking up screenshots, and less stiff than a perfect ellipse

Shapes are vector elements: afterwards you can edit nodes, width and colour with the direct-select tool, and scale without quality loss

Do not use shapes for the main subject of an illustration. They are regular geometry — draw characters with a brush

Text: horizontal, vertical, art text

Which of the three

Horizontal: ordinary layout. Headings, captions, watermarks

Vertical: characters stack downwards and columns run right to left. For Chinese classical, poetry or seal-style layouts

Art text: horizontal text with an outline and decoration. Cover titles and poster headlines

What the property panel offers

Font, size, bold / italic, colour, line spacing, letter spacing, alignment, outline and shadow.

How to use it

Pick the tool, drag a box on the canvas to define the text area, then type. The box width decides where lines wrap.

Text stays vector: double-click any time to change the words or the size, with no quality loss

Do not use vertical text for long paragraphs. Columns run right to left, and past thirty or forty characters it gets tiring to read

Annotation: arrow, number badge and two mosaics

1. Arrow (A)

Drag a line; each end can have its own arrowhead. Width, colour, arrow style and size are all adjustable.

2. Number badge (N)

Click to drop a numbered circle on a filled disc. The number increments automatically. Ideal for step-by-step diagrams.

Both the disc colour and the number colour can be changed.

3 and 4. Two mosaics

Pixel mosaic (M): the classic blocky grid. Obviously censored at a glance

Blur mosaic (G): gaussian blur. Unreadable but not harsh, for places that must be hidden without looking ugly

Both have an adjustable brush size.

For anything that must stay hidden, use pixel mosaic and lay it on thick — a blurred area can sometimes be recovered by raising contrast

Do not use mosaic as a painting brush over large areas. It only occludes; heavy coverage looks bad

Two erasers: hard edge and soft edge

Eraser (hard edge)

What you scrub is what goes, with a crisp boundary. For trimming shape edges and clearing small patches.

Soft-edge eraser (fades out)

The edge fades outward, so no hard ring is left behind. For tidying fur after a cutout and removing shadows.

Both share these controls

Size, hardness (soft-edge width), and opacity / flow.

Erasing only affects the current layer: pixel layers go transparent, and vector objects (boxes, lines, text) can be removed whole

Do not expect transparency on the background layer — it reveals the background colour. Convert it to a normal layer first if you need a hole

Eight retouch brushes: blur, light, saturation

Three blur brushes

Fine blur: small radius. Skin flaws and tiny unwanted details

Wide blur: large radius. Backgrounds and whole areas

Blend: smooths the seam between two very different colours

Two light brushes

Dodge: brightens what you paint. Adding a touch of highlight

Burn: darkens what you paint. Shadows and contours

Clarity and saturation

Sharpen: bring out detail locally. Do not paint the whole image with it

Saturate / desaturate: local vibrance — keep the subject lively and let the background go grey

Retouch brushes edit pixels directly and create no layer: duplicate the layer first if you want a way back

Do not scrub back and forth at full strength. All eight accumulate; a few passes and the image is ruined. Undo and redo instead

Local effects: focus blur, spotlight, desaturate

What each one does

Focus blur: what you paint stays sharp and everything around it blurs — a fake fast lens

Spotlight: what you paint keeps its brightness and the surroundings darken — pushing the eye to the subject

Desaturate: what you paint keeps its colour and the rest turns grey — subject in colour, environment grey

The key: you paint the protected area

It works backwards from everything else — where you paint is where nothing happens. Want the person sharp? Paint them in fully.

Parameters

All three have a strength slider you can still change afterwards, and all three can be undone and repainted.

Paint the subject's outline carefully. Anything outside stays sharp with it; anything you miss gets blurred away

Do not stack all three. Focus blur plus spotlight plus desaturate at full strength looks like a cheap poster

Gradient tool: choosing among five

The five types

Linear: one straight direction. The most used — skies, background panels

Radial: spreads from the centre outwards. Glows and spotlights

Angular: sweeps around the centre. Fans and halos

Reflected: mirrored either side of the centre line. Metal reflections, cylinders

Diamond: from the centre towards the four corners. Diamond highlights

How to use it

Drag a line: the start is the beginning of the gradient, the end is its finish, and the length decides how gradual the transition is.

Short drag means an abrupt change; long drag means a gentle one.

Colours

One stop at each end, and both support transparency (transparent stops show as a checkerboard).

The gradient shares a cell with the bucket. Use the small triangle at the corner to switch

Do not paint it straight over the image. A gradient covers everything beneath — put it on its own layer and lower the opacity if you want it as atmosphere

Direct select: fixing a line you drew wrong

What it can edit

Vector elements: shapes (rectangles, polygons, stars), pen paths, arrows, text frames and vector strokes.

Not pixel strokes — those are colour, with no points to pull.

Four operations

Drag an anchor to reshape. Square anchors are nodes; round ones are Bezier handles

Drag a handle to change the curvature of that segment (only the curve sub-tool shows them)

Click anywhere on the line to insert a new node

Change properties once selected: width, colour, line style (7), end arrowhead, tapered tail

Two sub-tools

Open the flyout for "straight" and "curve": inserted nodes stay straight with the former and come out smoothed with the latter.

This is the whole point of vectors: you can still fix it afterwards. A wobbly pixel stroke must be undone and redrawn; a vector line can be pulled back

Do not expect it to edit pixel strokes. To change one, select it and convert it to a vector stroke first