From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

Panning and zooming documents - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

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Panning and zooming documents

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- [Instructor] There are a number of different ways to zoom in and out and pan around images in Photoshop. I'm going to show you a number of different ways so that you can choose your favorite. Here in bridge. I'm going to select the Mesquite Dunes and Zabriskie Point image and use Command + O in order to open them both into Photoshop. Now the easiest way to select the zoom tool is to choose it in the toolbar or just tap the Z key. By default I've got it selected to zoom in on the options bar, so every time I click, I'll zoom into the image. I can either choose the zoom out option or just hold down the Option key on Mac or the Alt key on Windows if I want to zoom out. If I click and hold, I can continuously zoom in on an image, and if we go far enough, we'll actually start seeing this pixel grid overlay, and this is called animated zoom. If I want to zoom in and out much faster, I can use Scrubby Zoom. I do this by just clicking and dragging to the right to zoom in or dragging to the left to zoom out. We can also zoom using the navigator panel. I'll go to the window menu and then choose navigator, and here we can use the slider to zoom out or zoom in. We can also pan by just moving the rectangle or I can zoom by holding down the Command key on Mac or Control key on windows and clicking and dragging to a specific area. I'll close that for now. If we look at the view menu, there are four shortcuts that I use all the time to zoom in and out, and that's Command + or - to zoom in and out or Command + 0 to fit on screen, which means I'll be able to see my entire document or a 100% is Command + 1. So to zoom in, I do Command + to zoom out is Command -, Command + 0 is fit on screen and Command + 1 will zoom to a 100%. All right, let's talk about panning. I can select the hand tool or just tap the H key, and when I'm zoomed in, I get the scroll bars at the bottom as well as on the right hand side of the preview, but the nice thing about the hand tool is that I can scroll in multiple directions at once. Now if you click and drag the mouse and then release the mouse while you're still moving it, you get what's called Flick Panning. Now if you don't like this, all you have to do is click and drag, but then stop moving the mouse before you release the mouse button. So it's up to you whether or not you like Flick Panning. There's also a preference for that that you can turn off. Now, if I have another tool selected, like the move tool, pressing the space bar will temporarily give me the hand tool. In fact, you can hold the space bar to get the hand tool and then add the Command key to zoom in or release the Command key and grab the Option key in order to zoom out. We can also double click on the hand tool in order to zoom to fit on screen and double click on the zoom tool to zoom into a 100%. Now, if we're working with multiple images, well I'll choose window and then arrange and then tile these. If we want to match the zoom or location, we can use the window menu, arrange, and then match zoom location, rotation or all. Now, if I enable zoom all windows and I have the zoom in option selected, when I click on one image, they'll both zoom in or if I hold down the Option key, I can zoom out on both open windows at the same time. I'll uncheck that for now, but just know the hand tool has a similar option to scroll all windows. Photoshop also has a number of ways to display images in the interface called screen modes. We can view them under the view menu screen modes, standard screen mode. That's our regular screen mode and with this interface, you have those scroll bars that we used earlier. Then there's full screen mode with menu bar, and it gives you a little bit more screen real estate and then you've got full screen mode, which is great for presentations. If we want to toggle through these, well, you'll notice that at the bottom of the toolbar, they each have the letter F after them, so F is the keyboard shortcut, so let me select the Mesquite Dunes. I'll use Command + 0 to zoom out, and then I'll tap F once and we can see that there's no longer any scroll bars, even if I zoom in, and if I tap F again, then the panels are hidden, I'm in full screen mode, so I could use Command + 0 to fit on screen again. Now while you are in this full screen mode, you can tap the tab key to bring back your panels and your tools, tapping the tab key again will hide them. All right, I'll tap F again and that will cycle us back through to the standard screen mode. I'll tap tab and that'll bring back our panels and tools. So as you can see, there are a variety of different ways to zoom and pan and view your images in Photoshop. It's good to know that they all exist, so you can find the method that works the best for you.

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