Photoshop CC: The Missing Manual

Changing Your View

Photoshop gives you a variety of ways to view images, and different views are better for different editing tasks. 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 into your image is crucial; it makes fixing imperfections, doing detailed clean-up work, and drawing accurate selections a zillion times easier. One way to zoom is to use the Zoom tool, which looks like a magnifying glass. You can click its icon at the bottom of the Tools panel or simply press Z (see Figure 3-10); then click your image, hold down the mouse button, and drag right to zoom in or drag left to zoom out. Alternatively, you can click repeatedly with the Zoom tool to get as up close and personal with those pixels as you want, and then Option-click (Alt-click on a PC) to zoom back out. You can also zoom using your keyboard, which is faster if your hands are already on it: Press ⌘ and the + or – key (Ctrl-+/–).

Tip

To turn off the pixel grid that appears when you’re zoomed in to 501 percent or more, choose View→Show→Pixel Grid.

If your computer has a graphics processor that supports OpenGL (see the box on Understanding the GPU, OpenGL, and OpenCL), you can hold down your mouse button while the Zoom tool is active to fly into your image, zooming to a maximum of 3,200 percent; simply Option-click ...