- Selection tools
- The Rectangular Marquee tool
- The Elliptical Marquee tool
- Single Row or Single Column Marquee tool
- The Lasso tool
- The Polygonal Lasso tool
- The Magnetic Lasso tool
- Feather the edge (make it soft and fuzzy)
- Modify your selection
- The Quick Selection tool
- The Magic Wand tool
- The Pen tool
- The Crop tool
- Transform commands
- Free Transform
- Transform menu options
The Pen tool
To learn to use the Pen tool, see pages 160–163. The Pen tool is very different from any other tool. If you use a Pen tool in InDesign or Illustrator, you’ll find this one similar.
When you draw with the Pen tool, Photoshop automatically stores a path in the Paths panel. If you don’t see the Paths panel on your screen, choose “Paths” from the Window menu.
![paths-panel.jpg](/content/images/chap4_9780321772831/elementLinks/paths-panel.jpg)
You can have many paths on an individual Paths layer (although if they are unrelated to each other, make separate layers for each one). You can apply a fill and stroke to any path, but the fill and stroke do not stick to the path itself—they appear on another layer as raster images.
We often draw a path around irregular objects (or people) that we want to separate from a background. The path we draw can be made into a selection, then we can use that selection to delete the background. For instance, in the example below, we want to put the stones on a layer by themselves, so we can add whatever background we want. I’ve drawn a path around each stone. All three paths are on one path layer in the Paths panel.
- Open an image, then open the Paths panel (as mentioned above).
- Click the Create new path button at the bottom of the Paths panel.
- With the new path layer selected, select the Pen tool in the Tools panel and draw a path around each stone.
- Click the Load path as a selection button (bottom of the Paths panel). The path turns into a marching ants selection.
- The stones are selected, but we want to inverse the selection so we can delete the image background: From the Select menu, choose “Inverse” (below, left).
- Press Delete to erase the image background.
- If the stones are on a Background layer, the background is replaced by the current Background color.
- If the stones are on a regular layer, the background is replaced by transparency (shown below, right). We can now create another layer below the stones layer, and fill it with a new background color or image.
- To add drop shadows, double-click the stones layer and select the “Drop Shadow” option in the Layer Style dialog (see pages 102–103).