Toolbar and tools

Selects and drags layers on the canvas. A single click picks the top layer under the pointer, with transparent pixels falling through to whatever you actually see beneath them. A fresh click auto-selects the whole group a layer belongs to; drag on empty canvas to rubber-band multiple layers.

Tip. Alt-drag duplicates the layer and drags the copy. Cmd/Ctrl-click targets one element inside a group. Shift-click adds or removes layers. Double-click drills into a group or starts editing text.

Works like Move but always targets the exact element you click, even when it sits inside a group (direct selection). Reach for it when Move keeps grabbing the whole group instead of the one piece you want.

Tip. Same as holding Cmd/Ctrl with the Move tool.

Drag out a rectangular selection. Selections limit where painting, filling and effects take effect, so use it to protect the rest of the image.

Tip. Shift adds to the current selection, Alt subtracts from it. A tiny click clears the selection.

Draw a freehand selection outline by dragging. On release the loop closes into a selection. Good for organic, non-rectangular areas.

Tip. Shift adds, Alt subtracts. Needs at least three points to form an area.

Click to select an area of similar color. The Tolerance option sets how close colors must be to be included, and Contiguous limits the selection to the connected patch you clicked.

Click an object and a built-in AI model traces its outline for you. Every extra click refines the same selection, and Alt-click removes an area you did not mean to include.

Tip. Needs its model. Download it under Settings, WunderPaint, Local AI Models. Press Escape or start a New selection to pick a different object.

Trims the canvas down to a chosen area. Drag a crop box (or type an exact size), then click Apply or double-click inside the box to commit.

Paints soft, anti-aliased strokes in the foreground color. By default the finished stroke goes into the active layer, the way you would expect from any editor, and a switch puts each stroke on a layer of its own instead. Opacity caps the whole stroke while Flow controls how fast paint builds up, and a Style decides whether the paint is plain alpha or behaves like a real medium.

Draws hard-edged strokes with no softness and no build-up. Use it for crisp, pixel-precise lines.

Rubs out pixels on the active image or raster layer; the layer is converted to pixels on first edit. It takes the same tips as the Brush, so you can erase through a texture instead of only dragging a round hole. Shapes and text are not erased this way, they are changed through their own properties.

Tip. When a layer mask chip is active, the eraser paints on the mask instead.

Fills an area with the foreground color. Clicking a shape recolors its fill, clicking text recolors the text, clicking a stroke recolors it, and clicking an image flood-fills by color. A click that hits nothing adds a full-canvas fill layer at the bottom.

Tip. An active selection limits the fill to inside it.

Drag to paint a color blend across the layer or selection. The direction and length of the drag define the gradient. Dragging on an existing gradient layer just re-aims it.

Tip. Hold Shift to snap the angle to 45 degree steps.

Copies pixels from one part of an image to another. Alt-click sets the source point, then paint elsewhere to stamp those pixels in. Works on the active image or raster layer.

Tip. You must Alt-click to set the clone source before painting.

Paints a blur or a sharpening effect onto an image or raster layer. Switch between the two modes in the options bar.

Adds editable type. Clicking the Text button in the rail immediately drops a ready-to-type, centered text box. With the T shortcut you can instead click once for point text or drag a box for text that wraps.

Tip. Click near a drawn path to run text along it, or click inside a shape's fill to flow text inside it.

Drags out a vector shape. Pick which one from a grid of previews rather than a list of names: eighteen of them, from rectangle and ellipse to pill, arch, shield, tag, ribbon and blob. Every shape stays editable afterwards, and any of them can be turned into node-editable path points.

Tip. Hold Shift to keep it square or proportional, Alt to draw out from the center.

Draws precise paths one anchor at a time. Click to place corner points, drag to pull out curved bezier handles, and click the first point again (or double-click) to finish. The result becomes either a filled shape or a stroked path.

Tip. Finalize as Fill Path for a solid shape or Stroke Path for a line.

Samples a color from anywhere on the canvas into the foreground color. Fully transparent pixels are ignored.

Tip. Alt-click to set the background color instead of the foreground.

Drags the canvas to pan the view around without moving any layers.

Tip. Hold the Space bar with any tool to pan temporarily.

Click to zoom in, Alt-click to zoom out, or drag a box to zoom straight to that area.

Opens the AI panel on the right so you can generate a new image or transform the current one from a text prompt. It is a shortcut to the panel, not a tool you draw with on the canvas.

Installed extensions can add their own buttons to the bottom of the tool rail, after a divider. What each one does depends on the extension that added it.

Hovering, or keyboard-focusing, any tool pops a small label to the right showing the tool's name and its shortcut key, so you can learn the shortcuts as you work.

Shown when the model has proposed an area. The highlighted region is what the buttons below will act on.

How to correct the proposal: click a missing part to include it, Alt-click an unwanted part to drop it.

Feathers the boundary, so a cutout does not sit on the background with a hard cut.

Moves the boundary outwards or inwards by a few pixels, which fixes a halo or a bitten-off edge without re-clicking.

Keeps only the highlighted area on the layer and clears the rest.

Deletes the highlighted area from the layer and keeps the rest.

Turns the area into an ordinary selection instead of changing the layer, so any other tool can work with it.

Discards the proposal and starts the detection again.

View menu, the same place the Navigator is switched on and off. The close button in its header switches it off too. It only appears while a paint tool is active.

Each paint style ships three brushes tuned for it - wash heads for the watery media, bristle and knife heads for the pastes, stick heads for the dry media. They sit pinned at the top of the tip strip, and picking a style puts its first brush in your hand.

The wet styles bring their own sliders: Drying speed, Grain, Edge darkening, Wetness, Bleed, Coverage, Smearing, Open time, Tooth, Pressure and Pickup - each style shows only the dials its physics actually has.

Every tip drawn as a real stroke with the engine that will paint it, so the preview cannot lie about what the tip does. Click one to switch.

A hue ring with a shade square inside it: drag the ring to turn the hue, drag inside to pick the shade. Your recent colors sit underneath. The Eraser has no color, so this part of the panel is not shown for it.

Solid, Jitter and Gradient, in one row under the wheel. One at a time, because they are three answers to the same question rather than three switches to combine.

On the Tip shape heading. It puts the scatter and spacing back to what the tip itself says, and the color scatter back to the amounts the brush ships with.

Disc, Ring, Star, Polygon, Bar, Leaf, Arc, Dots, free Paint, Icon, Emoji and Image. Drag one to move it; each has its own settings, such as Sides, Waist, Vein, Sweep and Line width.

Turns an element into a hole instead of a shape. A tip with a hole in it paints a ring, which no amount of stacking would give you.

Rolls a whole tip from one of sixteen blueprints, from Stardust and Blossom to Comet, Snowflake and Gear. A starting point to change rather than a finished answer.

Save keeps a tip for later, across documents. Saved tips are listed in the brush panel above the shipped ones; clicking one COPIES it into the open document, which is what lets the picture survive being opened somewhere else.

Click the tip you are already holding a second time. Editing changes every stroke already painted with it, because a stroke records the tip it used rather than a copy of it.

Rectangle, Ellipse, Line, Polygon, Star, Arrow, Heart, Speech Bubble and Badge. Polygon and Star take a side count, and rectangles, polygons and stars take corner rounding.

Triangle, Diamond, Pill, Arch, Shield, Tag, Ribbon, Cross and Blob. The Pill stays a capsule at any width, the Arch is the window shape for holding a photo, and the Tag has a real hole punched in it.

Whichever you pick, you get a vector layer with fill, stroke, corner settings and the option to convert it to editable path points. The preview is a picture of it, not a picture instead of it.

The active paint color. Click the swatch to open the color picker and choose a new one.

The secondary color. The Eyedropper's Alt-click sets it, and some tools use it as a second color. Click to open the color picker.

Swaps the foreground and background colors with each other.

Resets the foreground to black and the background to white in one click. The small black-and-white icon sits at the lower-left of the widget.

The large square plus the hue strip at the top. Drag inside the square to set saturation and brightness, and drag the strip to pick the hue.

Sets the color's transparency. Below 100 percent the color is emitted as an 8-digit hex that carries the alpha, so it stays translucent on the canvas.

Three tabs that switch the numeric fields below between a hex code, red/green/blue channels, and hue/saturation/lightness.

Samples any pixel anywhere on your screen using the browser's system eyedropper. Only shown in browsers that support it.

Type an exact color as a 3, 6 or 8 digit hex code. The leading # is added for you if you leave it off.

Red, green and blue channel inputs for entering a color by its RGB values.

Hue, saturation and lightness inputs for entering a color the HSL way.

The star next to the hex field toggles the current color in your personal saved swatches. A filled star means the color is saved.

Captioned rows of colors pulled from your Brand Kits and from palettes saved in the Color Schemer, for one-click reuse.

The palette that Image, then Colors, then Extract Colors from Image pulled out of the active layer: up to twelve colors, kept for the current session. It does not appear on its own and it is not a list of every color used in the document.

The dominant colors sampled automatically from the current artwork.

The colors you starred. They are remembered across sessions.

Colors you applied recently, remembered across sessions.

A fixed set of preset swatches, greyscale first then colors ordered by hue.

The color from the wheel, on every mark. What a brush has always done, and where it starts.

Under Jitter: how far around the color wheel a mark may land. A little goes a long way, and this is the one that carries the effect - a red stroke reaches into orange and pink long before the other two show at all.

Under Jitter: how much the strength of the color may vary from mark to mark.

Under Jitter: how much lighter or darker a mark may be. On its own it reads as depth rather than as a different color.

A ramp along the stroke. The bar is the same multi-stop editor the Gradient tool uses: click it to add a stop, drag one to move it, double-click to recolor it, right-click to drop it. Transparency travels with the stops, so a ramp that ends on nothing fades the stroke out as you lift off.

How often the ramp runs over one stroke. It turns around at each end instead of jumping back to the first color, so a repeat never leaves a seam in the middle of a line.

The color modes are hidden under Watercolor, Gouache, Acrylic, Oil and Smudge. Those styles work the color out from the pigment and read only coverage from the stroke, so a second opinion about color would sit there doing nothing.

A mark keeps its shade. Strokes are re-rendered from their path whenever the picture is drawn, so the shades are rolled from the mark position rather than freshly each time; a saved design opens looking exactly as you left it.

Plain alpha blending. The fastest of the ten, because it skips the paint simulation entirely.

A real wash: the water flows and blooms, pigment rides it, edges dry darker (the coffee ring), grain settles into the paper's valleys, and standing water redissolves dried paint on the layer. Dials: drying speed, grain, edge darkening, pickup.

A brush with no pigment at all. Wet the paper for wet-in-wet painting, push standing color around, or scrub dried paint on the layer back into motion - it redissolves harder than any loaded brush. Dials: wetness, drying speed, pickup.

Dense and staining: it flows less than watercolor, fixes fast, and barely lifts once it has set. Dials: wetness, bleed, drying speed.

Opaque body color on the paste engine: it covers, stays where the brush puts it, mixes while open and dries matt. Real gouache redissolves, and so does this one - the brush lifts dried layer paint back into the stroke. Dials: wetness, drying speed, grain, pickup.

Loaded and covering with a fast lock: once it sets, it stays set, and the brush barely lifts it again. Semi-gloss body with visible bristle work. Dials: wetness, drying speed, coverage, pickup.

Thick paste that stays open for a long time: while it is open, new strokes mix into it as pigment, the paint drags along the stroke direction, and repeated passes build real impasto thickness that catches the light with a glossy specular. It also picks dried layer paint up into the stroke. Dials: wetness, smearing, open time, pickup.

A dry stick on toothy paper: the dust catches the ridges of the grain first, so light pressure breaks over the paper and heavy pressure fills the valleys. Sets moments after the hand stops. Dials: pressure, tooth.

Charcoal's colored, softer sibling: true color instead of the darkened stick, more dust per pass, less bite in the tooth - velvet instead of scratch. Dials: pressure, tooth.

A blender with no paint of its own: it picks up whatever lies under it - wet paint and dried layer paint alike - and smears it along the stroke, mixing as pigment on the way. Dials: pickup, smearing, open time.

One sheet for the whole document, chosen in the options bar: Auto gives every medium its traditional surface (cold-pressed paper for the washes, canvas for the pastes, laid paper for the dry sticks); Hot press, Cold press, Rough, Canvas and Laid paper apply one surface to all of them. More tooth holds more pigment and breaks dry strokes harder.

The paste media stand proud of the sheet: thickness is a real height field, lit from the upper left, with a specular that follows the medium - oil shines, acrylic half-shines, gouache stays matt. Wet paint glosses harder than dry.

The full wheel, sized to the palette. It sets the shared foreground color, same as the panel's wheel.

The heading carries an eyedropper with the color that sat under your right-click - wet paint included. One click makes it the paint color; it only appears when that color differs from the one you hold.

The last 18 colors you painted with, newest first. Click to reuse.

The two numbers you change most, with scrubbable labels and values.

Bakes the living wash into the layer immediately instead of waiting for it to dry - one history step, same result.

The brush diameter in pixels. Type a value or drag the label to scrub it.

The paint color, which is the shared foreground color, shown as a swatch you can click to change.

Chooses the tip shape and texture. Options run from Hard Round and Soft Round to textured tips like Chalk, Charcoal, Spray, Halftone, Stars and Confetti, each shown with a live stroke preview. The brush panel shows all of them at once, in groups.

Caps how opaque the finished stroke can become, no matter how many times the tip passes over.

How much paint each pass lays down; strokes over a spot build up. Lives in the brush panel (it left the options bar to keep the bar lean).

The softness of the tip edge; lower values feather the edge more. Hidden for the Pencil and for stamp-style Brush tips that have their own texture.

Paints mirrored or rotated twins of every stroke. Vertical and Horizontal mirror across the canvas center line, Fourfold does both at once, and Star 3 to Star 12 spin the stroke around the canvas center - the vocabulary matches the Particle Strokes extension.

Saved brush-setting chips (size, opacity, flow and hardness). Click one to apply it; Alt-click removes it.

Saves the current brush settings as a new named preset chip.

How the finished stroke meets the pixels underneath. Normal is plain alpha; the other five mix pigment, so blue over yellow becomes green rather than grey.

Puts every stroke on its own recolorable stroke layer instead of painting into the active layer's pixels. Only offered for the Normal style: the wet media always paint into the layer, because a living wash cannot be split into per-stroke layers.

Scatter, Spacing, Opacity jitter and Size jitter, plus Hue, Saturation and Brightness jitter for the color. Shown only for tips that stamp a mark rather than draw a line. Each starts at the tip's own value, and one button puts them all back.

The document's sheet for all wet media: Auto (each medium on its traditional surface), Hot press, Cold press, Rough, Canvas or Laid paper. Changing it affects new strokes; a wash that is still wet dries on the paper it started on.

With a stylus, pressure drives the wet media: more water from a watercolor brush, more paste from an oil brush, more dust from a charcoal stick, and the stroke width breathes with it. A mouse always paints at full pressure.

Leaning the stylus answers per medium, with no dial to set: charcoal and pastel on their side lay a broad, light, soft-edged mark that lets the paper's tooth show - the classic shading grip. A flatter brush paints wider and wetter with its belly, a flat knife spreads its load thinner. A mouse always paints upright.

Stroke stabilization: the brush point trails the cursor on a short string and only moves once the string is taut, so hand jitter and hard corners round into calm curves before any paint is laid. 0 is raw input; higher values are a longer string. Works for every style, wet media included, and the stroke still ends exactly where the hand stopped.

Picks the type family from the built-in system and self-hosted font libraries.

Sets the font weight from thin to heavy.

The type size in pixels. Type a number, or drag the px label to scrub the value up and down.

Toggles bold by flipping the weight between 400 and 700.

Slants the text into an italic style.

Draws an underline beneath the text.

Non-destructive all-caps toggle (v1.300): layout, canvas and exports render the text in capitals while the stored text keeps its original case - switch it off and the original casing returns.

Horizontal alignment of the text: left, center or right.

Aligns the text to the top, middle or bottom of its box.

Bends the baseline into an arc. Negative curves the text downward, positive curves it upward, and 0 keeps it straight.

The text fill color, shown as a swatch that opens the color picker.

Lives in the floating context bar over the selected text, not in the options bar above the canvas. It opens a popover with rendered layout suggestions for the current text, so you can restyle a headline in one click. Shown only for eligible text layers.

Not in the options bar: the ready-made text effects sit behind the Presets button in the context bar's Annotate group, and only while a text layer is selected. See the text style presets section for the full list.

Non-destructive paragraph lists (v1.301): every non-empty line gets a bullet or its running number in canvas renders, exports and SVG, while the stored text keeps its raw form. Toggle between none, bullets and numbering.

Chooses which shape the tool draws.

Fills the shape with either a solid color or a repeating pattern.

The shape's fill color, which is the shared foreground color.

The outline color of the shape. Leave it transparent for no outline.

The thickness of the shape's outline in pixels.

Rounds the corners of a rectangle. Higher values give softer corners.

The number of sides on a polygon. Shown only when Polygon is selected.

Switches the outline between Solid, Dashed and Dotted. Dotted draws round dots via line caps; both work on line and arrow shapes too.

For dashed and dotted strokes: the dash length and the space between segments, in pixels. Defaults follow the stroke width. They appear on the Move tool's contextual options for a selected shape layer, not while the Shape tool is drawing.

Switches the brush between softening (Blur) and adding edge contrast (Sharpen).

The diameter of the effect brush in pixels.

How strong each pass of the brush is.

The softness of the brush edge; lower values feather the effect.

How similar a color must be to the clicked pixel to be included in the selection. Higher values grab a wider range of colors.

When on, only the connected patch you click is selected. When off, every matching color across the whole image is selected.

How close a color must be to the pixel you click to be filled. Higher values fill a wider range.

Contiguous fills only the connected region you click; Global fills every matching pixel in the layer at once.

How opaque the fill is.

The fill color, which edits the shared foreground color so the toolbar and brushes stay in sync.

Constrains the crop box to a fixed aspect ratio, or leaves it free. Social presets also line up with each platform's safe zone.

The exact crop width and height in pixels, editable while a crop box is active.

Commits the pending crop, resizing the canvas to the box. Disabled until you have a crop box.

Tip. Double-clicking inside the crop box does the same.

Discards the pending crop box and leaves the canvas untouched.

Picks a saved gradient preset to start from.

The geometry of the blend: a straight Linear ramp, a Radial burst from the center, or an Angle sweep around a point.

Edits the color stops that make up the gradient. Add, move and recolor stops along the bar.

Flips the order of the stops so the gradient runs the opposite way.

Recolors a selected shape's fill.

Sets a selected shape's outline color.

The selected shape's outline thickness in pixels.

Fills the selected shape with a repeating pattern instead of a solid color.

The opacity of the selected image, raster or smart layer. Applies to every selected layer at once.

The blend mode, controlling how the layer mixes with the layers beneath it.

The Zoom options bar shows a reminder of the controls: click to zoom in, Alt+Click to zoom out, and drag for a marquee zoom to a specific area.

Makes an exact copy of the selected layer (or whole group) and places it just above the original. Use it to repeat an element without redrawing it.

A single button that cycles a text layer's vertical alignment inside its box: top, then middle, then bottom, then back to top. The icon shows the current setting. Only appears for text layers.

Tip. Point text starts at middle; text boxes start at top.

A single button that cycles a text layer's horizontal alignment: left, center, right, and (for text boxes only) justify. The icon shows the current state. Only appears for text layers.

Tip. Justify is offered only for area text (a drawn text box), which has a width to fill.

Opens a popover with six ready-made layout suggestions rendered from this layer's own text, so you can restyle a headline in one tap. Only appears for text that can be laid out.

Reopens the tool that created the layer so you can change it. The label matches the source: Edit Chart, Edit Table, Edit QR Code, Edit Mockup, Edit Background, Edit Smart Object, or Edit <name> for an extension generator (3D text, maps, and so on).

Tip. Especially handy in Easy Mode, where the layer right-click menu is hidden.

A color swatch that opens the color picker to recolor the layer in place. It sets the fill for a shape and the text color for a text layer. Only appears for shape and text layers.

Moves the selected layer one step up the stacking order so it sits in front of the layer that was above it.

Moves the selected layer one step down the stacking order so more layers cover it.

Fits the canvas view to the selected layer with a little padding around it, so you can work on it up close without hunting for it.

Tip. Frames the layer's box plus about 15% margin on each side.

Opens a small grid of align and distribute buttons right above the layer. See the Align and distribute flyout for the individual options.

A {{ }} button that inserts a dynamic token into a text layer, such as a post title or site name, so the text updates from real data. Only appears for text layers.

Removes the selected layer (or group). It is always the last button in the bar.

Lines up the selected layers by their left edges.

Lines up the selected layers so their horizontal centers share the same vertical line.

Lines up the selected layers by their right edges.

Lines up the selected layers by their top edges.

Lines up the selected layers so their vertical centers share the same horizontal line.

Lines up the selected layers by their bottom edges.

Spreads the selected layers so their left edges sit at equal distances. Layers of different widths therefore keep different gaps between them. Needs three or more layers selected.

Spreads the selected layers so their top edges sit at equal distances. Layers of different heights therefore keep different gaps between them. Needs three or more layers selected.

Drag a corner handle to resize in two directions at once, or an edge handle to stretch one side. Corner handles on images and smart objects keep their aspect ratio automatically.

Drag just outside a corner to rotate the layer around its center. The angle is normalized to a range of -180 to 180 degrees.

Hold Shift while dragging a corner handle to keep the layer's width-to-height ratio fixed, so it scales evenly instead of stretching.

Hold Shift while rotating to lock the angle to a hard 15 degree grid, useful for straight or exactly diagonal alignment.

Hold Alt (Option) while resizing to grow or shrink the layer around its center point instead of the opposite handle.

During free rotation the angle gently snaps to the nearest 15 degree multiple when you come within 3 degrees of it, so level and diagonal are easy to hit.

Tip. Hold Alt for fully free rotation with no snapping.

Dragging a corner handle of a text layer scales the font size along with the box, so the type grows proportionally. Rich text runs keep their relative sizes.

When a group is selected, a corner handle scales the whole group uniformly around the opposite corner, and the rotate handle spins every member around the group's center so the layout stays rigid.

Clicking a layer selects it. With the Move tool this resolves to the outermost group the layer belongs to, so grouped artwork selects and moves together.

Tip. The click is pixel-aware: transparent parts let the click fall through to the layer you actually see.

Press on an empty part of the canvas and drag a box to select every layer it touches. Each touched layer resolves to its group, so you select whole units.

Hold Alt (Option) and drag a layer to instantly create a copy and drag the copy away, leaving the original in place. The new layer is named with a copy suffix.

Hold Shift and click layers to add them to the current selection, or click an already-selected layer to remove it, building a multi-selection.

Hold Cmd (Ctrl) and click with the Move tool to pick the exact element under the cursor instead of its group. This is the same as using the Select tool.

Double-click a layer to act on it: text opens for editing, a smart object opens its contents, a cover/contain image lets you reposition the picture inside its frame, a pen shape opens anchor editing, and a grouped child is selected on its own.

When snapping is on and you drag a single layer, it snaps to the edges and centers of other layers and shows smart guide lines to help you line things up.

Dragging a new marquee or lasso with no modifier keys replaces the current selection with the new one.

Hold Shift while dragging to add the new area to the existing selection, growing it.

Hold Alt (Option) while dragging to cut the new area out of the existing selection.

A plain marquee drag smaller than a few pixels (in effect a click on empty canvas) clears the current selection.

Click on an object to select it. The tool marks a positive point there and returns a soft-edged mask of the object.

Hold Alt (Option) and click to add a negative point, telling the model to leave that area out of the selection.

Every additional click adds another point to the same mask, so you can select a laptop and then click its screen to include it, without losing what you already had.

Tip. Press Escape, use the refine card's New selection button, or apply the cutout to start a fresh object.

If the Smart Select model is not installed, the tool shows a message with a link to download it under Settings before it will run.

Each click drops a new anchor point and connects it to the previous one with a straight line.

Click and drag when placing a point to pull out symmetric bezier handles, turning the join into a smooth curve.

Once you have at least three points, click back on the first anchor to close the path into a loop.

Double-click to end an open path without closing it, then choose how to turn it into a layer.

Finishes the pen path as a filled shape using the current foreground color. Best for solid custom shapes and icons.

Finishes the pen path as an outline stroke in the foreground color, with no fill. Best for lines, arrows, and open curves.

Hold Shift while drawing a shape to constrain it to equal width and height (a perfect square, circle, and so on).

Hold Alt (Option) while drawing a shape so it grows outward from your starting point in all directions instead of from a corner.

When the shape is a line, the drag direction is remembered so the line runs the way you dragged, even diagonally up or to the left.

With the Gradient tool, drag across the canvas to set where the gradient starts and ends and in which direction it runs. If a gradient layer is already active, the drag re-aims it.

Hold Shift while dragging a gradient to lock its direction to the nearest 45 degree increment for clean horizontal, vertical, or diagonal fills.

After dragging a crop box, double-click inside it to apply the crop, resizing the document to the box and shifting the layers to match.

A plain click with the Zoom tool zooms in around the point you clicked.

Hold Alt (Option) and click with the Zoom tool to zoom out around the cursor.

Drag a rectangle with the Zoom tool to zoom the view so that exact area fills the canvas.

A plain click samples the pixel under the cursor into the foreground color; hold Alt (Option) to send it to the background color instead. Fully transparent pixels are ignored.

Alt-click first to set the point you want to clone from, then paint elsewhere to copy those pixels. The tool reminds you if you paint before setting a source.

Tip. The source pixels are frozen at the start of each stroke so cloning stays stable.

With a pressure-sensitive pen or tablet, how hard you press scales the brush and eraser stroke, so light strokes are thinner and firmer strokes are fuller.

When a layer's mask chip is selected, the Brush and Eraser paint the mask instead of the layer. Painting with black hides parts of the layer and white reveals them.

The Eraser works only on image or raster (pixel) layers. Select one first; shapes and text are changed through their own properties, not erased.

The bucket recolors the exact shape or text you click, floods a matching region of a pixel layer within the tolerance, or, if you click empty canvas, drops a full-canvas fill layer at the bottom. A selection limits the fill to inside it.

Clicking the Text tool in the rail immediately places a centered, ready-to-type text box in the middle of the canvas, the one-click path most people expect.

A single click with the Text tool starts a free-growing point text at that spot, sized from the current font settings.

Drag out a rectangle with the Text tool to create a fixed-width text box. Text wraps inside the box, and only area text can be justified.

Click close to a drawn pen path or stroke and the new text flows along that path. The path is copied onto the text and hidden, and the two stay grouped as one unit.

Click inside a filled shape and the text flows to fit inside that silhouette (area text in a shape). The text is centered and picks a color that reads on the shape's fill, and the pair stays grouped.