So I've seen a lot of Photoshop videos that appear to use a red tool. What is this? Is this literally a brush with a color change?
>>274974
No, that looks like a mask to me.
I don't really use the red though.
Usually you just paint in black or white on the mask layer and it shows through the next.
I only really use the red if I'm messing with selections.
>>274974
its a mask, a lot of default tools that use masking use the red brush as default. you can usually change the color and opacity though. it's just a way to select an area that you want to apply some sort of effect or change to.
It's a quick mask. Instead of doing selections with the marquee tool or lasso tool or whatever, it's usually a lot quicker and more versatile to hit Q to enable quick mask mode and start brushing away. When you're done, hit Q again and the brushed area turns into a selection, feather and all intact.
Keep in mind, quick masks aren't limited to brushes, but you can also use grayscale patterns, noise filters or pencil or whatever to make the selection.
If you double click the quick mask button, you can choose what the mask color indicates (selected areas, or masked areas) and what color to use and with what opacity.
I personally use Selected areas with 50% green, but anything really works.
I assigned a Content-aware-fill hotkey to F1, so fixing retarded mistakes is super fast because you can simply hit B, then Q-paint-Q-F1-repeat
the screenshot u took is in the liquify filter interface. it masks out the areas under the red so you can reshape everything else but leave the red untouched