From the course: Photoshop 2025 Essential Training

Customizing the toolbar - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2025 Essential Training

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Customizing the toolbar

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- [Instructor] In addition to using different panels, you'll also spend a lot of time in Photoshop switching tools. Now, almost every tool has a keyboard shortcut. For example, the move tool has a keyboard shortcut of V, and the marquee tool has a keyboard shortcut of M. So if I tap the V key, then I'll select the move tool, and if I tap the M key, I'll select the marquee tool. Almost all the tools also have nested tools. So when you click and hold on a tool, you can see all of the nested tools and the keyboard shortcuts. For example, the L key is assigned not only to the selection brush tool, but also the lasso tool, the polygonal lasso tool, and the magnetic lasso tool. So how do you select the different tools? Well, certainly we can choose them from the flyout here, or we can hold down the shift key and then tap the L key in order to cycle through all of the tools that have the L key assigned as the keyboard shortcut. Now, you may see a tool tip when you hover your cursor on top of a tool, but in a previous version, I disabled that by going to the Photoshop menu and then choosing either settings or preferences, depending on what operating system you're on, on Windows, it would be under the edit menu, and then selecting tools. And I disabled both the rich tool tips and the regular tool tips. Okay, if you don't like the default order of the tools, or if you want to hide some of the tools that you don't use very often, you can customize the toolbar. We can either choose the edit menu and then scroll down and choose toolbar, or we can click on the three dots in the toolbar, hold down our cursor, and then choose edit toolbar. If we want to split out nested tools, we can simply drag and drop them. So now, we can see that the rectangular marquee tool and the elliptical marquee tool each have their own place or position on the toolbar, and you don't have to click and hold because they're no longer nested. We can also remix or rearrange our different tools. For example, if I wanted to move the lasso tool up with a marquee tool, I could do so. All right, for now, I'll go ahead and put that back. We can also remove tools that we don't use very often. I can just drag a tool over here to the right, to the extra tools, and then they'll no longer be visible when we select our tool. We can however, always access them by clicking on the three dots. In addition, we can change the keyboard shortcut for any of the tools that we want. So for example, if I wanted the rectangular marquee tool and the elliptical marquee tool to have different keyboard shortcuts, well, then I could scroll down and look for a tool that I use very often. Let's say I don't use the eraser tool, its keyboard shortcut is E, so I'd scroll back up, click on the M, and instead enter E. I could even remove the E from all of the other tools that have it so that I would be assured that every time I tap E, I would get the elliptical marquee tool, but for now, I'll go ahead and leave them on. After spending time setting up your own custom tools, you can save these custom sets by choosing save preset. Then just give it a name, and save it in the default location. However, for this course, I'm going to choose to restore the defaults just in case someone has skipped this video. A few additional tool options, tools by default are in a single column, but we can click on the double Chevron here in order to see a two column view. In addition, we can float the toolbar. If I click on the grabber handle and just drag it away from the edge, it's now floating, I can dock it over here with the other tools or drag it to a secondary monitor. And finally, if tools aren't behaving like you think they should, you can always right click or control click on Mac on the icon for the tool in the options bar and choose to reset the tool or reset all tools. This only changes the options in the options bar for the tool. It won't actually reset the position of the tools or any shortcuts that you've changed. So as you can see, the tool layout in Photoshop is very flexible. And don't worry about learning the shortcuts to all the tools right away, you'll learn the ones that you need to know, and soon enough, it'll be second nature just to use the keyboard shortcut to select the tool much more quickly and efficiently in Photoshop.

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