Tools are grouped on the shelf the way Photoshop groups them, with a rule between bands. A tool with a small triangle in its corner shares a slot with others: press and hold, or right-click, to get the flyout. Shift with the slot’s key cycles through them.

Move

Tool Shortcut What it does
Move V Drags the active layer. Its options bar carries the align and distribute buttons.

Selection

Tool Shortcut What it does
Rectangular Marquee M Selects a rectangle.
Elliptical Marquee Shift M Selects an ellipse.
Lasso L Freehand selection; releasing closes the outline.
Polygonal Lasso Shift L Selects a polygon, one click per corner.
Magic Wand W Selects everything contiguous with the clicked pixel and within tolerance of its colour.
Color Range Shift W Selects everything within tolerance of the clicked colour, contiguous or not.

Measure

Tool Shortcut What it does
Crop C Trims the document to a rectangle.
Free Transform Ctrl T Scales, rotates and moves the active layer, committed as one step.
Eyedropper I Picks a colour from the composite.

Paint

Tool Shortcut What it does
Brush B Paints with the current colour, size, hardness and texture.
Clone Stamp S Paints with pixels sampled from elsewhere in the layer.
Eraser E Clears pixels to transparency.
Gradient Shift G Draws a gradient across the selection, or the layer.
Paint Bucket G Fills a contiguous region with the current colour.

Focus tools

Tool Shortcut What it does
Blur R Softens where you paint.
Sharpen Shift R Increases local contrast where you paint.
Smudge Ctrl Shift R Drags colour along the stroke.

Tone tools

Tool Shortcut What it does
Dodge O Lightens where you paint.
Burn Shift O Darkens where you paint.
Sponge Ctrl Shift O Saturates or desaturates where you paint.

Vector

Tool Shortcut What it does
Path Edit A Moves, adds and deletes the anchors of a shape layer’s path.
Text T Creates and edits a text layer.
Shape U Draws a shape layer from a preset.
Tool Shortcut What it does
Hand H Pans the view. Holding Space gives you this temporarily from any tool.
Zoom Z Zooms in; hold Alt to zoom out.

Tool options

The options bar under the toolbar changes with the active tool. It is the only piece of chrome that moves as you work — everything else stays where you left it.

Some examples:

  • Brush — preset, size, hardness, texture.
  • Move — align and distribute.
  • Text — font and size.
  • Magic Wand and Color Range — tolerance and the four combine modes.
  • Marquee and Lasso — the four combine modes.

Every tool is also an action

Each tool appears in the command palette (Ctrl Shift P) and each shortcut is rebindable in Preferences. The list above is the default binding, not a fixed one.