7 tools illustrator beginners will be interested to use

I usually use illustrator for manual vector work (when I say 'manual', I am referencing the new image trace features in CS6) but I love to design colourful website backdrops, especially using these awesome tools. If you you are a beginner with Illustrator, I'm sure you will love this.

1. Bring up the sub menu of the icon that looks like an upside down moustache and select a tool. Here's a demo of those tools. (in order)

Warp Tool

 Twirl Tool (one of my favs)

 Pucker Tool

 Bloat Tool

 Scallop Tool

 Crystallise Tool (good for comic book stuff)

 Wrinkle Tool (makes for good sound-wave pictures)

 Enjoy!

Below is something I made using a few of these tools.

Fotor: A good enough replacement for Photoshop.

Fotor is free at the moment on the mac app store... grab it. I know a lot of people have written about it online but when I tested it out myself I had to share.

What Fotor is: A good and powerful way to edit photos WITHOUT adjusting any sliders or graphs, panels and colours. It's probably what you would imagine if you mixed Elements 10, with iPhoto and the Snapseed iPad app in a big mixing bowl...

It has an easy drag and drop interface:

A huge selection of well described menu items:

And another sidebar for selecting different sub menus, and export features:

It has gained its place next to Photoshop and Illustrator in my dock. On the whole: I think this is a great app for on-the-go photographers who don't have the time to open Photoshop and setup for an editing sesh.

Using the Healing Brush Tool (Photoshop)

Looking to erase some clouds from your photo? I for one get annoying plane streams in sunset photos, and I think they divert your attention from the purpose of the photo.

Open up your image in Photoshop, and click and hold on the 'Spot Healing Brush Tool' until you get a menu of more healing tools. Choose 'Healing brush tool, or alternatively press J.

Once you have this, hold down the alt key so that you have a little circle with a cross when hovering over your photo. Click a part of the image where it is plain and will match the surroundings of where the replacement is going to go. Think of it as a paint pallet, and the part you are clicking on is the colour you will have on your paintbrush.

Let go of the alt key so that you have a plain circle again, and paint over the part you want gone. Photoshop does the rest.

As you can see, the tool has gotten rid of part of the aeroplane stream. Every so often, hold down alt again and select a new part of the photo. This means your photo wont have any repetitive markings.

Final Result