The Options Bar

Most of the tools have settings associated with them. To access these settings, take a peek at the options bar that extends across the top of your screen.

You'll be able to change the various settings more quickly if you know exactly how to navigate the options bar. For example, each of the painting and retouching tools has a percentage setting near the right side of the bar. There are quite a few ways to change this number. One is to highlight the number and then type a new one. You can also click the number and then use the up arrow and down arrow keys on your keyboard. (Hold down the Shift key to change the number by increments of 10.) You can also click the arrow to the right of the number and drag across the slider that appears. And finally there's my favorite method; you can click on the name of the setting you'd like to change (like Opacity) and then drag your mouse to the right or left to change the setting. All of these options will work with most numeric entries in a palette (not just the options bar), but there is a special method for changing the percentage setting for your painting tools. If none of the text fields in the options bar is active for editing, you can just type a number (not in a field, just type). If you type 1, you'll end up with 10%, 23 will give you 23%, 0 will give you 100%, and so forth (for smaller percentages, type 01 to get 1%, 02 to get 2%, and so on.)

If there's more than one setting that lets you enter a number, press Return or Enter to highlight the first one, then Tab your way through the others. Once a number is highlighted, you can change it by pressing the up arrow and down arrow keys or by typing a new number.

If you've completely screwed up the settings that appear in the options bar, don't despair. You can Control-click (Mac) or right-click (Windows) on the Tool icon that appears on the far left of the options bar and choose Reset Tool to reset everything back to its default settings.