The Photoshop Elements Toolbar for Digital Scrapbooking

The red eye removal tool is perfect to quickly remove red eye from photos. When this tool is selected, there is a sub-menu below the main menu that allows you to manage pupil size and darkness. There is also an “Auto” button that, with a single click, finds and fixes the red eye in the photo.

Use the healing brush when you need to fix larger areas of a photo. You specify where in the image you’d like the “repair material” to come from. With this tool selected, you can activate a fly-out menu to choose the spot healing brush instead. The spot healing brush tool is used for small repairs and makes intelligent repair material selections based on the pixels surrounding the area you’ve chosen with the spot healing brush.

The clone stamp tool allows you to paint an area with the pixels that you’ve specified from another area of the image. You also have a fly-out menu option (by holding your mouse button down when you select the clone stamp tool) of choosing the pattern stamp tool. This paints a pattern that you choose from an image or from patterns included (or loaded into) Photoshop Elements.

This tool is pretty self explanatory. Use it to erase pixels from an area that you choose. You also have fly-out menu options that include the background eraser tool and the magic eraser tool. The background eraser tool helps you remove the background from images while attempting to keep the foreground. The magic eraser tool automatically removes all pixels similar to the area you clicked.

The brush tool works like a paint brush, allowing you to paint pixels with whatever color you have set for the foreground color. From the fly-out menu you can also choose the impressionist brush, color replacement tool, and the pencil tool. The impressionist brush can give your image a fun, stylistic look (similar to an impressionist painting). The color replacement tool allows you to choose a color from your image to paint over with a new color. The pencil tool is a freehand drawing tool that creates hard lines.

Use the smart brush tool to make color and tonal changes to an image. Activating the smart brush tool opens a sub-menu below the top main menu to choose what kind of change you’d like to make. There is also a detail smart brush tool available from a fly-out menu when selecting the smart brush tool.

The paint bucket tool allows you to fill an area with a chosen color. You can use a selection tool to fill a defined area. The entire canvas will be filled if no selection is made prior to using the paint bucket tool.

With the gradient tool you can create a gradient (a blend of 2 or more colors) and fill a selected area (or an entire canvas) with the gradient you’ve created.

Use the rectangle tool to draw shapes in your canvas that are auto-filled with the color you’ve selected for your foreground color. The fly-out menu provides you with additional shape choices such as rounded rectangle, ellipse, polygon and more.

The blur tool will soften (or blur) hard edges in your image. When you activate this tool, you’ll have a sub-menu available that allows you to choose which brush you’d like to use when using the blur tool. You can also activate a fly-out menu that lets you choose the sharpen tool or the smudge tool. The sharpen tool will make the edges of the area you brush over look sharper. The smudge tool simulates the look of dragging a brush through wet paint in order to move the paint around.

The sponge tool changes the vividness of the area of the image that you “sponge” over. Holding down the mouse button on the sponge tool activates the fly-out menu so that you may also choose the dodge tool or burn tool. The dodge tool lightens an area of an image. The burn tool darkens an area of an image.

The brush tool, shape tool, and paint bucket tool all make use of the foreground color set in your color palette. For detailed instructions on how to set these colors, please see Setting Foreground and Background Colors in Photoshop Elements.