The tool rail and options bar

Chapter 14 · The tool rail and options bar

Reviewed 4 November 2026 · Sources: Photopea tool documentation (basic, advanced, smart, vector, text), in-application options bar, PCMag review

The left rail holds twenty-two tool slots, and several of those slots are stacked: the icon you see is only the last tool you used in that family, and a long press or a right-click reveals the rest. That stacking is the single most confusing thing about the toolbar for a new user, because a person who has never right-clicked the lasso icon will conclude that Photopea has one lasso when it has three. This chapter lists every tool in every stack, the key that selects the family, and the options bar controls that appear when the tool is active.

The options bar is context-sensitive and it is where most of the real power sits. A brush is not a brush until you have set its size, hardness, blend mode, opacity, flow and pressure behaviour, and every one of those lives in the strip above the canvas rather than in a panel. The pattern to learn is that the options bar always shows, left to right: the tool's mode buttons, its numeric parameters, its behaviour toggles, and then a set of tool-specific extras. Once that rhythm is familiar, a tool you have never used becomes readable in about ten seconds.

The tool stacks, in rail order

Two conventions sit below the rail and are easy to miss. The foreground and background colour swatches at the bottom open the colour picker on click, swap with X and reset to black and white with D. The Quick Mask button beside them toggles the selection into a paintable overlay, which is the same thing as Q and the same thing as Select > Edit Quick Mask. Screen mode is a third small icon, and it cycles the interface chrome rather than the document.

Move and Artboard

Move is the tool you will use more than any other and the one whose options bar is most often ignored. The bar carries auto-select behaviour (whether clicking the canvas selects the topmost layer under the cursor or the active layer), a group-versus-layer toggle for auto-select, an align set that only activates with two or more layers selected, a distribute set, and a three-button alignment-to-selection switch. The align and distribute buttons are the fastest way to centre something precisely and they are routinely overlooked because people reach for guides instead.

Holding Shift constrains movement to one axis. Holding Alt while dragging duplicates the layer. Holding Ctrl temporarily switches to the Move tool from any other tool, which is the gesture that makes layer nudging feel native. Arrow keys nudge by one pixel and Shift plus an arrow nudges by ten, and both respect the current selection and snapping settings.

Artboard shares the slot. Drawing with it creates a new artboard with its own clip rectangle, background and ruler origin; the options bar sets the preset size, orientation, background colour and whether the artboard is labelled. Selecting an artboard with the Move tool resets the ruler zero point to that artboard's corner, which is the behaviour that makes multi-artboard documents usable for UI work.

Marquee, Lasso and Quick Selection

The four selection families share a common options-bar block: four mode buttons (new, add, subtract, intersect), a Feather field, an Anti-alias checkbox and a Sample All Layers checkbox where relevant. Learning that block once means you can use any selection tool in the application, because the block is identical across all of them. Photopea also supports the XOR-style behaviour you get from holding Shift for add and Alt for subtract, which is faster than clicking the mode buttons.

Rectangle and Ellipse Select carry a Style dropdown — Normal, Fixed Ratio, Fixed Size — which is how you make a 1:1 square or an exact 1080×1080 region without dragging carefully. Single Row and Single Column are one-pixel selections used for grid alignment and for repairing a single scan line. The Magnetic Lasso adds Width, Contrast and Frequency controls that govern how aggressively it snaps to edges; Frequency sets how often it drops a control point, and lowering it helps on soft-edged subjects where the default produces a jagged path.

Magic Wand's options are Tolerance, Contiguous, Anti-alias and Sample All Layers. Tolerance is the whole game: on a clean flat-colour graphic a value around 20 selects a region cleanly, and on a photograph no value will, which is why Quick Selection and Object Selection exist. Quick Selection adds a brush size, a hardness and an Auto-Enhance toggle, and it works by growing a region from the pixels you paint across. Object Selection is the newest of the three and the only one that uses a model: you draw a bounding box and it detects the object inside it. It is not the neural Select Subject that Photoshop ships, and on hair, fur and glass it is visibly weaker.

Crop, Perspective Crop and Slice

Crop's options bar sets ratio, width, height, resolution, whether to delete cropped pixels, whether to use a content-aware fill on the discarded edge, and a grid overlay for rule-of-thirds composition. The crop rectangle can be rotated by dragging outside a corner, and the confirm and cancel buttons sit at the right end of the bar rather than in a dialog. Delete Cropped Pixels is the setting that decides whether the discarded area is recoverable: with it off, the pixels stay in the file and Reveal All brings them back.

Perspective Crop is the tool for photographing a rectangle at an angle — a whiteboard, a document, a screen. You drag four corners onto the actual corners of the object and Photopea computes the rectifying transform. It is the fastest route from a skewed phone photo to a flat scan and it is buried in a stack that most people never open. Slice and Slice Select exist for web export workflows: you draw regions, name them, and export them as separate files.

Eyedropper, Colour Sampler, Ruler and Note

Eyedropper's options bar sets sample size (point, 3×3 average, 5×5 average, 11×11 average, 31×31 average, 51×51 average), sample source (current layer or all layers) and whether the sampled colour goes to foreground or background. Holding Alt samples into the background swatch. On a noisy photograph the averaging options matter far more than the point sample, because a single pixel is rarely representative.

Colour Sampler drops persistent readout points that stay in the Info panel as you work, which is how you monitor a skin tone or a neutral grey while making adjustments. Ruler measures distance and angle between two dragged points and writes the values into the options bar and the Info panel. Note attaches a text annotation to a canvas position; it is stored in the PSD and is useful for handing a file to someone else with instructions attached to the exact spot.

Healing, Patch, Content-Aware Move and Red Eye

The healing stack is where Photopea is closest to Photoshop for practical retouching, and the options bar is where the differences show. Spot Healing Brush has a Size, Hardness, a Content-Aware versus Proximity Match mode switch, and a Sample All Layers toggle. Content-Aware is the mode that produces the seamless result; Proximity Match is faster and produces visible streaking on textured backgrounds. The tool runs locally on the device rather than calling a server, which is why it takes one to five seconds on a normal image and up to ten on a very large one.

Healing Brush adds a source-setting workflow: Alt-click to set the sample point, then paint. Unlike Clone Stamp it adapts the sampled texture to the destination's colour and luminance on release, which is why it works across a gradient sky where Clone Stamp would leave a visible patch. Patch takes a selection and drags it to a source region, then blends on release; its options bar adds Source versus Destination mode and a Diffusion slider that controls how much the seam is softened.

Content-Aware Move is the tool that moves an object and fills the vacated area in one gesture. Its options bar sets the move mode (Move or Extend), the adaptation strength and the structure and colour adaptation sliders. It was added in version 4.9 and it is genuinely useful for shifting a subject within a frame, though on complex backgrounds it produces the smeared artefacts that all content-aware fills produce. Red Eye is a single-purpose tool: click the pupil, and the options bar sets pupil size and darken amount.

Brush, Pencil, Colour Replacement and Mixer Brush

The Brush options bar is the densest in the application and it is worth learning properly, because everything you paint inherits its settings. Left to right it carries: the tool preset picker, the brush tip thumbnail and size, the blend mode, opacity, flow, a smoothing percentage, a pressure-sensitivity toggle for size and one for opacity, and an airbrush-style build-up switch. The distinction between opacity and flow is the one people get wrong: opacity caps the maximum coverage of a single stroke, while flow controls how much paint is laid down per dab, so a low-flow high-opacity brush builds up gradually within one stroke.

Size and hardness are also adjustable from the keyboard, which is faster than the bar: [ and ] change size, { and } change hardness. Holding Alt and right-dragging on the canvas opens a HUD-style size and hardness picker. With a stylus that reports pressure, the two pressure toggles turn the pen into a genuinely expressive tool, and this is one of the features that makes Photopea credible for digital painting rather than only retouching.

Pencil is the hard-edged variant with no anti-aliasing, which is what you want for pixel art and for one-pixel lines. Colour Replacement paints the foreground colour while preserving the underlying luminance and texture, which is how you recolour a garment without losing its folds. Mixer Brush blends the foreground colour with what is already on the canvas, with options for wetness, load, mix and flow, and it is the closest thing Photopea has to a natural-media painting engine.

Clone Stamp and Pattern Stamp

Clone Stamp's options bar carries size, hardness, blend mode, opacity, flow, an Aligned checkbox and a Sample dropdown (current layer, current and below, all layers). Aligned is the setting that decides whether the source point moves with the brush or resets after each stroke: with Aligned on, the offset between source and destination is preserved across strokes, which is what you want for a continuous repair; with it off, every new stroke starts from the same source point, which is what you want for stamping a repeated element.

Pattern Stamp paints with a pattern instead of sampled pixels and adds an Impressionist toggle that scatters pattern instances along the stroke. It is a niche tool, but it is the fastest way to fill a large area with a texture without creating a fill layer.

Eraser, Background Eraser and Magic Eraser

Eraser's options bar sets size, hardness, opacity, flow and an Erase To History checkbox that restores the last saved state rather than transparency. Background Eraser is the interesting one: it samples the colour under the brush centre and erases only pixels within a tolerance of that colour, with Limits (Discontiguous, Contiguous, Find Edges), Tolerance and a Protect Foreground Color option. It is the manual counterpart to Remove BG and on a clean studio background it is often faster and more controllable than the AI route.

Magic Eraser is a click-to-erase tool with Tolerance, Anti-alias, Contiguous and Sample All Layers. On a flat white background it removes the background in one click; on a gradient it leaves a halo, and the fix is to lower the tolerance and click several times rather than raising it.

Gradient and Paint Bucket

Gradient's options bar is where the five gradient types live — Linear, Radial, Angle, Reflected and Diamond — alongside the gradient preset picker, blend mode, opacity, Dither and Transparency toggles, and a Reverse checkbox. The preset picker opens the gradient editor, which is where stops, midpoints, colour and opacity are set; the editor is documented in chapter 16. Dragging with Shift constrains the gradient to 45-degree increments, which is how you get a clean vertical or horizontal blend.

Paint Bucket fills contiguous regions within a tolerance, with a Contiguous toggle, an All Layers option and an Anti-alias setting. Its most useful mode is filling a selection rather than a colour region, because a selection-bounded fill is predictable and a tolerance-based fill is not.

Dodge, Burn and Sponge

All three share an options bar with a Range dropdown (Shadows, Midtones, Highlights), an Exposure or Flow percentage, an Airbrush toggle and a Protect Tones checkbox. Range is the control that makes dodging and burning feel like darkroom work rather than like painting grey: setting Shadows means the tool only affects the darker values, which is how you open up a shadow without blowing the highlights. Protect Tones reduces clipping and colour shift at the extremes, and it should be on for almost all photographic work.

Sponge is the saturation counterpart, with Saturate and Desaturate modes and a Flow control. It is a blunt instrument compared with a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer with a mask, but it is useful for local desaturation of a distracting background element without building a mask.

Type tools

Horizontal Type and Vertical Type share an options bar that carries font family, style, size, anti-aliasing method, alignment, colour, and a set of OpenType buttons for ligatures, stylistic alternates and fractions. The bar also has a create-type-layer versus create-mask switch and a warp text button that opens a style-and-bend dialog. Clicking once creates point text that grows along a line; dragging creates paragraph text in a box that wraps. Clicking on a path contour creates text on a curve, and the Path Select tool then moves or flips it.

Horizontal Type Mask and Vertical Type Mask produce a selection in the shape of the glyphs rather than a text layer. That is the correct tool when you want to fill letterforms with an image: type the mask, then paste or fill inside it. The Character and Paragraph panels carry the rest of the typography controls, and they are listed in chapter 15.

Pen, Free Pen, Curvature Pen and the point tools

Pen is the Bézier tool: click to place a corner point, click-drag to pull out handles and create a smooth point, click the first point to close the path. The options bar carries the three modes — Path, Shape and Pixels — plus a Rubber Band toggle that previews the next segment, an Auto Add/Delete toggle, and the boolean operation buttons for combining paths. Those three modes are the most important concept in the vector half of Photopea: Path adds to the current path without creating a layer, Shape creates a new shape layer, and Pixels rasterises immediately into the active raster layer.

Free Pen converts a freehand drag into a smoothed Bézier curve, with a Tolerance control that sets how closely the curve follows your hand. Curvature Pen is the modern variant: you click points and it infers smooth curves between them, and dragging a segment adjusts its curvature without handle manipulation. Add Anchor Point, Delete Anchor Point and Convert Point are the editing tools for an existing path, and they are what you reach for when a curve is almost right.

Path Select and Direct Select

Path Select moves, duplicates and deletes whole paths, and it is the tool that lets you cut and paste paths between layers and between documents. Its options bar adds alignment and distribution buttons that work on selected paths, plus a set of path-arrangement controls. Direct Select works one level down: it selects individual anchor points and handles, and with Shift it selects points across different paths, which is how you join or reshape two contours at once.

Shape tools

The shape stack contains Rectangle, Rounded Rectangle, Ellipse, Polygon, Line, Custom Shape and Parametric Shape. All of them share the Path/Shape/Pixels mode switch and the boolean operation buttons, and all of them draw with the current fill and stroke settings from the options bar. Rectangle and Rounded Rectangle add a corner-radius field; Polygon adds a side count; Line adds a weight; Custom Shape opens the shape preset gallery and accepts imported CSH files; Parametric Shape is the one that generates stars, spirals and other procedurally defined forms with their own parameter fields.

The fill and stroke controls in the options bar are more capable than they look. Fill can be none, a solid colour, a gradient or a pattern, and stroke can be any of those with a width, a position (inside, centre, outside), a corner style and a dash pattern. Setting a shape's fill to none and its stroke to a dashed line is a two-click operation here, and it is the reason shape layers are worth using instead of rasterising early.

Hand, Rotate View and Zoom

Hand pans the canvas; holding Space gives you the same behaviour from any other tool, which is why the Hand icon is rarely clicked. Rotate View shares the slot and rotates the on-screen view around the canvas centre without rotating the artwork, with a Reset button in the options bar and a numeric angle field. Digital painters use it constantly to get a comfortable stroke angle, and its presence is one of the signals that Photopea was built with illustrators in mind.

Zoom's options bar carries Zoom In and Zoom Out buttons, a Resize Windows to Fit toggle, a Scrubby Zoom toggle that lets you drag horizontally to zoom, and a set of percentage presets. Clicking zooms in, Alt-clicking zooms out, and dragging a rectangle zooms to that region. The one thing the options bar cannot do is give you a one-click 100 per cent, because Actual Pixels lives only in the View menu and on Ctrl+1.

What the toolbar does not have

Comparing this rail against Photoshop's is the fastest way to see where Photopea stops. There is no History Brush and no Art History Brush, so there is no way to paint a previous state back into a specific area — a real loss for retouchers who work that way. There is no Smudge tool in the paint stack, although Smudge exists as a filter-adjacent behaviour in some workflows. There is no Blur, Sharpen or Smudge brush in the toolbar at all, which means local softening and local sharpening have to be done with filters and masks instead. There is no 3D object tool, no video scrubber, no Frame Animation tool, and no Measurement Log.

There is also no way to customise the rail. You cannot add a tool that is not there, reorder the stacks, or build a custom toolbar. That is consistent with the rest of the product's philosophy: the workspace is fixed, the engine is deep, and the trade is deliberate. Chapter 15 covers the right-hand dock with the same item-by-item approach, and chapter 17 takes the filter menu apart in the same way.