Photoshop Elements 3: The Missing Manual

Changing Your View of Your Image

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 might 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 tile themselves so that you can see them all simultaneously. If you have two photos open, for instance, each photo window spreads itself out to take half the available space on your desktop. You're not stuck with this layout, though.

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

• Maximize. Each photo window takes up the entire Elements desktop. You can also click the large square at the right of the Editor shortcuts bar to switch to this view.

• Cascade.Your image windows appear in overlapping ...