Common Tool Pallete in Photoshop

Creating and modifying paths
The path tools create and modify paths, which are elements comprised of straight and curved segments and anchor points. You can then use these paths as a basis for a selection or to define a shape. Because of their precision, using path tools to ultimately create a difficult selection usually yields better results than you can achieve with the selection tools.

Using painting tools
The painting tools, in general, allow you to apply color or erase pixels. In the case of the Gradient tool, you can apply multiple colors simultaneously. And with the Art History Brush tool, you paint on a stylized effect rather than color. All the painting tools rely on the Brushes palette for the size, shape, texture, and angle for the tip of the tool.

Using tools for cloning and retouching
The cloning and retouching tools are the powerhouse tools to break out when you need to do some image repair work. These tools allow you to duplicate portions of your image, paint with a pattern, or seamlessly fix scratches, wrinkles, and other blemishes. The unique History Brush tool lets you actually paint a previous version of your image back into your current image — perfect for undoing mistakes or repairing edits that went awry. The new Color Replacement tool lets you replace the color of your image with the foreground color.

Creating effects with typographical tools
The type tools pretty much do as their moniker suggests — create type of varying sorts. The Horizontal Type tool and Vertical Type tool create regular old type, whereas the Mask Type tools create selections in the shape
of letters, which can then be filled with images.

Using focus and toning tools
The focus and toning tools allow you to enhance your image by altering the pixels in various ways. You can lighten, darken, blur, smudge, sharpen, saturate, or desaturate color in selective portions of your image. These tools work best for touching up smaller areas rather than the entire image.

Creating shapes
The Shape tools allow you to create vector-based elements in your image. Depending on the mode selected, these elements are automatically filled with the foreground color or left as just an empty path. The beauty of vector-based elements is that they are resolution independent, meaning that they always print at the resolution of the output device rather than the resolution of the image. Vector-based shapes created with the Shape tools can also be resized and transformed without any quality degradation, unlike raster images. Although vector-based elements are the heart and soul of the Shape tools, you can also create shapes filled with pixels of the foreground color.

Viewing, navigating, sampling, and annotating tools
Photoshop has an abundance of tools to help you view and navigate your image window. These tools allow you to zoom in and out, move your image within the window, and measure distances and angles. The Eyedropper and Color Sampler tools let you pick up and sample color respectively — handy for grabbing or evaluating color in an image. The Notes tool and Audio Annotation tool create written and audio notes that you can leave in an image window — useful for collaboration purposes or simply for reminders to yourself.

Using tools for the Web
Photoshop doesn’t have a whole lot of tools dedicated to the preparation of Web images (though it does have quite a few commands). That’s mainly because its companion program, ImageReady, takes up the slack in that department. You will find the Slice tool and Slice Select tool which allow you to create and select slices, or rectangular sections, from an image. You can then optimize, and apply Web features like rollovers and image maps, to those slices separately for the best viewing experience on your Web page.