The magic eraser tool can be a nice and quick tool to use in the right circumstances. Start out with a clean background image. This tutorial will help you to better understand it. I recommend that you duplicate the background layer first, by dragging it to the new layer icon...
If you're working on the same image and created a snapshot, go back to the original as shown and then you can continue working from scratch.
The patch tool is similar to the Healing brush and is located underneath it in their toolbar menu...
The healing brush is just an incredible tool in Photoshop 7 & CS. This tool alone is often worth the price of the software if you're a professional photographer or retoucher...
When you are signed up for the Educational Series you'll get the tutorial on how to create a path. Now I'm going to cover basic path editing. You can use the editing tools to modify your path/shape...
The pen tool can be quite difficult to actually master when using for advanced drawing including making curved paths but for now I'll give you an introduction to the Photoshop pen tool (& lead you into path editing) and how to use it to make a selection...
The sharpen tool isn't all that effective but you should be aware of it. With it you can sharpen pixels within the area of the brush that you use (sound familiar?). Once again you'll have brush palette options so you can choose the size of the sharpen brush...
You can use the blur tool to...you guessed it...BLUR. It's a great tool to soften pixels up. As with several other tools, you can change the size of the blur brush and even choose a hardness setting...
Create a new layer on your open document by clicking on the new layer icon at the bottom of the layers palette as shown. Now you have a new blank layer you can work on. Grab your paint bucket tool (this is one of the methods) and click to fill that entire layer with your foreground color...
I'm going to show you the Clone stamp tool in this tutorial. First another review of how to create a fill. This is one way to do it. First, make a selection with a rectangular marquee (or any other marquee). Here I'm just covering the right half of the document...
To start this layer mask tutorial, use the eyedropper tool to get a sample of any color in your document (like an open photo). Click and the sample will now become the foreground color that you can work with...