Photoshop CS5: The Missing Manual

Changing Your Image View

Photoshop gives you a variety of ways to look at your images; different views are better for doing different things. For example, you can get rid of the Application Frame (Meet the Application Frame), view images full screen, zoom in and out, or rotate your canvas to view images at an angle. This section teaches you how to do all that and more.

Zooming In and Out

Being able to zoom closely into your image is crucial; it makes fixing imperfections, doing detailed clean-up work, and drawing accurate selections a hundred times easier. One way to zoom is to click with the Zoom tool, which looks like a magnifying glass. You can find it at the bottom of the Tools panel or you can grab it by pressing Z (see Figure 2-10); simply click repeatedly to get as up close and personal to your pixels as you want. When you're ready to zoom back out, just Option-click (Alt-click on a PC) instead. You can also zoom using your keyboard, which is faster: press ⌘ and the + or – key (Ctrl + or –). To zoom in on a specific area, using the Zoom tool, turn off the Scrubby Zoom (Figure 2-10) checkbox in the Options bar and then drag with the Zoom tool to draw a box around the pixels you want to look closely at. As soon as you let go of your mouse button, Photoshop zooms in until the area you selected fills your document window.

Tip

In Photoshop CS5, you can turn off the pixel-grid that you see when you're zoomed in 501 percent or more by choosing View→Show→Pixel Grid.

Figure 2-10. Top: ...