Light and shadow define form by showing the volume and depth of an object on a flat surface. The way light wraps across surfaces creates highlights, midtones, and shadows that reveal curves, edges, and planes, making a shape read as three-dimensional. Color indicates hue, texture describes surface feel, and size relates to scale, but none of these alone establish the solid, volumetric presence that light and shadow deliver. By adjusting how light falls and where shadows fall, you communicate the form—the roundedness, flat planes, and overall mass of the object.

Understanding typography adjustments is about using the Character panel. This panel is where you control all the font-related attributes: font family and style, font size, leading (line height), tracking (overall letter spacing), kerning (spacing between specific character pairs), vertical scale, and baseline shift. These options let you shape how your text sits and reads within your design, independently of any image edits. The other panels serve different purposes. The Brushes Panel controls brush dynamics for painting. The Adjustments Panel contains tonal and color corrections like Levels, Curves, and Hue/Saturation. The Effects Panel applies layer styles such as shadows and glows. None of these affect font choice or typography in the way the Character panel does, so for adjusting typeface and typography attributes, the Character panel is the appropriate tool.

Masking is the technique that lets you hide or reveal parts of a layer without changing the underlying pixels. A layer mask is like a stencil attached to the layer: painting with black hides the corresponding areas, painting with white reveals them, and grays give partial transparency. Because you’re not erasing anything, you can always adjust, disable, or delete the mask to restore the full layer at any time. Masks can be created from selections, gradients, or brush strokes, and you can refine edges with feathering or soft brushes to blend seamlessly. This non-destructive approach is ideal for compositing or removing unwanted areas while keeping the original image intact.

Paths are the building blocks of vector images. A vector graphic describes shapes with mathematical paths—lines and curves defined by anchor points and handles—so the artwork can be scaled up or down without losing sharpness. Tools like the Pen or Shape tools create and edit these paths, letting you fill or stroke the shapes precisely. Pixels, by contrast, are the tiny squares that makeup raster images, which can become jagged or blurred when enlarged. Layers are just a way to organize content, not the mechanism that creates vector geometry, and filters are effects applied to existing content rather than the method used to define scalable shapes.