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How to See What You’re Working On

Lesson 7 from: FAST CLASS: Photoshop for Beginners: Essential Training

Mark Wallace

How to See What You’re Working On

Lesson 7 from: FAST CLASS: Photoshop for Beginners: Essential Training

Mark Wallace

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Lesson Info

7. How to See What You’re Working On

Mark explains how to navigate an image. You’ll learn how to zoom in and out, pan an image using the hand too, rotate for easier retouching, and use the Navigation Window.
Next Lesson: Selecting Things

Lesson Info

How to See What You’re Working On

It's now time to learn to see what you're working on. We call this navigation. We have a bunch of different tools and options to do just that. And so let's dive into Photoshop here. And the first thing we want to do is learn about screen mode. Screen mode allows us to choose how we see things on the screen. It's at the very, very lower left-hand corner over here so I can zoom in on that. If I click and hold, you can see that we have standard, full screen with the menu bar, and full screen mode alone. And so this just sort of allows us to get rid of some of the distractions. So I can do that by clicking and holding and then choosing one of these screen modes or I can just hit the shortcut key F to cycle through these. So F normal, F full screen with the menu, F just the image itself. So that is a wonderful way to just clear up the clutter by changing your screen mode. Now, the other thing we're gonna use all the time are the magnification tools. And so what I want to do here is go down ...

to the lower left-hand side. We have the hand tool and the magnifying glass. The magnifying glass is going to work exactly as you would anticipate. It will magnify your image. So if I click on that one time, every time I click, it increases that magnification a little bit. And now it's time to learn something new with Photoshop that's called a modifier key. And so, most tools can be modified to behave differently by clicking a key. And so in this example, the magnifying glass, if I hit the option key or the alt key, it goes from plus, magnifying to minus, unmagnifying. And so I can zoom in, hit the option or alt key and zoom out. So I'm modifying the behavior of the tool by clicking a key on the keyboard that's called a modifier key. We'll be doing that a lot as we go forward. So that's how you zoom in and zoom out with the magnifier tool. We also have our trusty options bar here so we can choose to zoom in or zoom out by using these little plus and minus things here, if you want. I like the option of the modifier key. It's a lot easier for me. You can also click this 100% to go all the way in to 100% view. You can say fit the image that I have on screen, show everything, or fill the screen. So it's just gonna fill it top to bottom, some of the sides, you can't see that. Now, the other thing that I can do here is I can use the menu items and so up here, we have view and so I can zoom in, I can zoom out. Don't know why you would do that, but you can. But notice, also, you have fit on screen, so that fits. So all the stuff that you see in your menu bar, you have also, are in the options bar you have in the menu. But you also have these shortcut keys and these are gonna be useful, very, very useful. So we have command or control plus, command and control minus, and then command or control zero, and then command or control one. And so let me show you how this works. So, I'm just gonna hit command and plus. We'll zoom in. Command minus, zoom out. If I want to see everything at 100%, command and one. If I want to see the whole thing, command zero. And now, a different tool, that is the hand tool. So on the lower left-hand side, I have the hand tool and if I double click that, I see everything. So it's the same as fit on screen. So that is if you double click that, you can fit on screen, double click the magnifying glass, go all the way in. Double click the hand tool, fit on screen. The other thing you can do is no matter which tool you have, except for the type tool, if you want to have the hand tool active, hit the space bar. So if I hit the space bar, now I can drag my image around with the hand tool. If I release the space bar, now I'm back to my magnifying glass. That works even if I have the move tool, if I have whatever tool I have, as long as I hit the space bar, I get the little hand and I can drag my image around. It's very, very nice. The only tool that the space bar doesn't give you the hand tool is the type tool. 'Cause you're typing stuff and it will actually enter a space and so that's going to be as expected. But all the other tools, hit the space bar, you get the hand tool. So I'm gonna zip out and show the whole thing. There's one other really amazing thing. It's called the navigator panel and I'm gonna go away (vocalizes), so you can see the navigator panel up here where I normally am. This allows you to do all of those things very, very quickly. So, underneath this little icon here, there's this little slider here so you can slide that to zoom in or zoom out. If you're zoomed in, you get this little red square here and you can click and move that and whatever's inside the square is what you see on the left-hand side. So this is normally the way I navigate. You can also go here and you can just type in. I want to zoom into 50%. And it'll go straight to 50%. Or I want to go into 300%. And so you can quickly tell the navigator panel exactly where you want to go. Also, you can click on the small mountain to zoom out, the big mountain to zoom in, or double click the small mountain to go to 100%, double click the big mountain to go to 300%. And so there's one other tool that I want to show you and that is the rotate tool. So sometimes you want to take, like you're working on a piece of paper and you want to rotate the object and then paint a little bit easier. You can rotate your image and you're not actually rotating and changing the image itself, you're just rotating it on screen and you can move it around. And so underneath the hand tool, if I click the hand tool and hold it, you'll see the rotate tool view and now I can rotate this around. And so maybe I want to just work a little bit on Lana's arm here, I can rotate that around, then I can zoom in, then I can go over to where her arm is, and I can paint or do whatever I need to do. And then once I'm done with that, I can put her back in the right orientation by double clicking on the rotate tool. I click and hold, I get back to the hand tool, I can double click that, and I get back. So it's all those different things to move around to sort of see what your image is doing.

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