Elements of Photoshop

Layers

A big part of photoshop is it's layers feature, which for some circumstances is essential. They are like stacked pieces of transparent plastic which can be moved on top of or underneath each other with different content on each layer. Within the layers feature, you can manipulate how each layer acts. This can be done by changing their transparency using the opacity, with layer masks, or by changing the blending. Blending and layer masks can be used to create double exposures like that seen in The Revenant's Poster.

Text Tool

The text tool is a very versatile tool which allows you to add text to a document on photoshop, then adjust the font, style, colour, size, leading, kerning and more. This is an essential element and can be used in pretty much anything. Text can also be arranged into certain shapes and paragraphs.

Crop Tool

The crop tool is pretty self explanatory and may seem simple, however it is a needed element which can actually be fairly complex. It allows you to crop in to a photo so that it's a smaller size, or crop outwards to make a larger canvas. While cropping in or out you can also rotate the crop window to change the area of the image that is being cropped. As well as this, you can change the crop ratio to ensure that the end crop result will be a specific ratio e.g. 1:1 (Square), 4:3 or 16:9.

Liquify Tool

The liquify element can be used to manipulate the structure of an image. Within it it has a range of different tools that can shrink/bulge an image, as well as push/pull parts of it around. This doesn't have many practical uses as it's quite destructive, however it is known to be used on pictures of models to alter body shape.