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How to See What You’re Working On

Lesson 12 from: Photoshop for Beginners: Essential Training

Mark Wallace

How to See What You’re Working On

Lesson 12 from: Photoshop for Beginners: Essential Training

Mark Wallace

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Lesson Info

12. 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

Lessons

Class Trailer
1

Class Introduction

00:52
2

Introducing Photoshop

02:37
3

The Class Materials

01:36
4

How To Open Files

01:42
5

Using The Home Screen

02:35
6

Exploring The Interface

03:30
7

Getting Additional Help

01:36
8

Understanding Workspaces

05:11

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. The 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 going to 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 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 key it goes from plus magnifying to minus um magnifying and so I can zoom in, hit the options are all 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 will be doing that a lot as we go forward. So that's how you zoom in and zoom out with the magnifying 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 and it's a lot easier for me. You can also click this 100% to go all the way into 100% view. You can say fit the image that I have on screen, show everything or fill the screen so it's just going to fill it top to bottom some of the sides, you can't see that. So that's how the magnifier tool works. It's pretty intuitive and straightforward. One other thing that you can do with the magnifier tool is if you double click on the magnifier glass. This little icon here, it will go straight to 100%. And so that is really easy. So you can do at the top or you can just double click that to go all the way into 100% and so I'm gonna go back here click on fit screen so that when I see the entire thing like that. Now the other thing that I can do here is I can use the menu items and so up here we have a view and so I can zoom in, I can zoom out. I don't know why you would do that but you can but notice also you have fit on screen so that fits 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 commander. 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 zoom in command minus zoom out If I want to see everything. 100%. Command in one. I want to see the whole thing. Command zero Now command zero has some special powers, things that will be learning. So sometimes you'll have these things called bounding boxes where you're working on an image. And so just to show you that you don't have to understand exactly what I'm doing. I am going to zoom out a little bit here and then I'm going to get a new tool that I'm gonna explain to you later and then I'm gonna drag this to make wanna larger and then notice I am off the screen. So I've got part of wanna part of this stuff, I can't see it anymore, like that has disappeared, I want to see everything. Command zero. Jump, it'll zoom out so I can see again my bounding box. So a lot of times when you're working on stuff you'll have to go beyond the borders of what you can see on screen to see everything you're working on. Just hit command zero. So if I zoom way up I'm off the screen, command zero I see everything. So I'm going to um not do any of that stuff. And now to see this again I have 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. Um 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 because 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. So you can see the navigator panel up here where I'm normally am. This allows you to do all of those things very, very quickly. So underneath this little icon here there's this little the 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 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%. We can go back to the hand tool, double click that we can see everything and so that's all you have to do. So just remember double clicking the zoom tool puts you at full screen, double clicking the hand tool, puts you where you can see everything. 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 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. So maybe I want to just work a little bit on wanda'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. If 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 and to sort of see what your image is doing now. Speaking of seeing what your image is doing and working on the image, that's what we're gonna do next. We're gonna start by selecting areas of this image and doing things with it. So stay tuned. We're doing that in the next session.

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Class Materials

Ratings and Reviews

Katie
 

Mark did a great job at explaining things and going over them multiple times throughout the lessons. My only issue was that sometimes it went a little faster than I could keep up and I needed to rewind it a bit and start again. But from someone who has never worked in photoshop before I 100% recommend this class to anyone trying to learn.

Terri Schwartz
 

Student Work

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