Photoshop Elements 6: The Missing Manual

Zooming and Repositioning Your View

Sometimes, rather than changing the size of your photo, all you want to do is change its appearance in Elements so you can get a better look at it. For example, you may want to zoom in on a particular area, or zoom out, so you can see how edits you've made have affected your photo's overall composition.

This section is about how to adjust the view of your image inside Elements. Nothing you do with the tools and commands in this section changes anything about your actual photo. You're just changing the way you see it. Elements gives you lots of tools and keystroke combinations to help with these new views; soon you'll probably find yourself making these changes without even thinking about them.

Image Views

Before you start resizing your view of your photos, Elements gives you several different ways to position your image windows. When you first use Elements, if you have more than one photo open at a time, your photos overlap each other so that you can see as much as possible of the front photo, with only the edges of the photos behind it visible. This is a very efficient way to work, but if you don't like it, you're not stuck with it.

When you go to Window → Images, you get several choices for how you want your image to display:

• Maximize Mode. Each photo window takes up the entire Elements desktop.

  Note

  In Maximize mode, you can only have one photo visible at a time. Switch to Cascade or Tile if you want to work on two or more photos simultaneously.