Sprite Editing help with Adobe Photoshop needed

[volzzilla]

I recently got this and was wondering if anyone can give me a few extra pointers.

I have the jist of pencil, magic wand, lasso/rect select, color picker and paint bucket from my use with Paint.net.

My question's are a little beyond the basics but some of you may know:
- is there a way to make the tool change to pencil automatically after using color picker or some other tool similarly? paint.net has this and it rocks
- rotation of a sprite seems cleaner than with other apps. will sharpen or the finer edge tools help with cleaning it further or just screw up the palette?
- how do you make palettes with it?
- any sprite edit tricks you can pull off with the pen tool?
- can any of the following tools help me with sprite editing: spot healing brush, healing brush, patch tool, history brush tool, art history brush tool, dodge tool, magic eraser tool, burn tool, and sharpen tool
- how does pen tool work exactly and any tricks you can do with it?
- are there any other tricks i should know?

thank you

[Swiziga]

-if the pencil tool is already selected u can switch back to it by pressing shift+b
-the sharpen tool makes edges more pixelated but idk about making stuff look cleaner
-the pen tool can be used to edit sprites by making new lines and curves. u could also use this tool to make character sprites i'm using it right now to try and make sprites of juri from ssf4(i thought it would be a lot easier but bleh)

-the history brush tool can be used to bring things back like if u started coloring in something to change whatever it is ur working on, the history brush tool remembers how it originally looked and wil bring back whatever was there before
-the dodge tool makes things brighter and the burn tool makes things darker
-the magic eraser tool erases one solid color if they are connected so if u had a background that was say all white and a sprite on that white  background the magic eraser would erase the white background but if the sprite ha white on it that is touching the white background it will erase those white pixels too so it can be annoying
that's basically what those tools do to my knowledge but i think u can find a way to use them to sprite. im no spriting expert i only started the other day with what i mentioned earlier
u should watch these videos to get tips on using the pen tool