If you're learning Photoshop, the tools panel is where everything starts. Get it wrong or ignore it, and you'll fight the software every time you open it. Get it right, and the whole thing clicks into place.
Coming to you from PiXimperfect, this thorough beginner's video with Unmesh Dinda covers the Photoshop toolbar from the ground up, starting with something deceptively simple: adding light to eyes using the brush tool. Dinda paints on a new layer, switches the blend mode to Overlay, and the result is a subtle but striking lift to the subject's eyes. The tilde key turns the brush into an eraser mid-stroke, which is one of those small shortcuts that saves a surprising amount of time. He also walks through how tools are organized into groups in the toolbar, why similar tools share a group, and how to access them by clicking and holding on any tool that has a small arrow beside it.
The section on customizing your toolbar is where the video gets genuinely practical. You can collapse the toolbar to one column or expand it to two, drag tools out of their groups so they're faster to reach, and hide tools you never use. Dinda shows how to save a custom toolbar preset so that if you accidentally hit "Restore Defaults," your setup isn't gone. He also covers a critical setting in the crop tool: "Delete Cropped Pixels." It's turned on by default, and if you leave it that way, cropped image data is gone permanently. Turn it off and you can always pull that area back.
The move tool section covers more than just dragging layers around. Dinda makes a strong case for keeping Auto Select turned off. When it's on, clicking near overlapping layers can grab the wrong one, especially when layer opacities vary. His solution is a hybrid: keep Auto Select off, but hold Command on Mac or Ctrl on Windows to temporarily activate it when you actually need it. That way you're in control by default, with the convenience available when you want it. He also walks through aligning layers to a selection versus aligning to the canvas, and why setting it to canvas almost always makes more sense.
There's more in the video that isn't covered here, including how to expand images with both Content-Aware Fill and Photoshop's AI-powered Generative Expand, how the reference point in the crop tool changes the way cropping works, and how to straighten a photo using the dedicated straighten feature rather than rotating by hand. These are the kinds of details that don't take long to learn but make a real difference in how efficiently you work. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Dinda.
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