From the course: Photoshop 2025 Essential Training

Panning and zooming documents - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2025 Essential Training

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Panning and zooming documents

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There are a number of different ways to zoom in and out of an image as well as to pan around and see different areas of the image in Photoshop. I'm going to select the Mesquite Dunes and Zabriskie Point images in Bridge and then use Command-O on Mac or Control-O on Windows in order to open them. I'll start with the Mesquite Dunes and I want to zoom in. We can select the Zoom tool from the toolbar or just tap the Z key. By default, the icon has a plus in it, and every time I click, I will zoom in on the image. If I want to zoom out, I can either use the options bar to select the icon with the minus in it, or we can keep with the zoom in icon, and then just hold down the Option key on Mac or the Alt key on Windows, and now when I click, I will zoom out. If I click and hold in the image area, Photoshop will continuously zoom in. If I zoom in far enough, we can see this pixel grid overlay. When you click and hold, that's called animated zoom. Now, if I click and drag, we can zoom in and out much faster. If I click and drag to the left, we zoom out. If I click and drag to the right, we zoom in. And that's called scrubby zoom. And you can see the option for it in the options bar. If you don't like it, you can always disable it. Another way that we can zoom is by using the Navigator panel. Under the Window menu, I'll select Navigator. And then I want to expand this. So I'm gonna click on the double chevrons right here. And then in the Navigator panel, we can click on the mountain icons to zoom out or zoom in. We can use the slider or we can enter in a number. We can also position our cursor on top of the red rectangle and we can click and drag to move to another location, or we can hold down the Command key on Mac or the Control key on Windows and click and drag over an area in the Navigator in order to zoom right to that area. If we look in the View menu, there are four options that I use all the time. Zoom in, zoom out, fit on screen, which enables me to see the entire document, or 100%, which zooms me to 100%. We can see that all of these keyboard shortcuts use the Command key on Mac or Control key on Windows, and then the plus, minus, zero, and one. So if I wanted to zoom in, we can use Command plus to zoom in, or Command minus in order to zoom out. We can use Command zero to zoom to fit in window, and command one in order to zoom in to 100%. Now, when we zoom in, we see that we have scroll bars on the right-hand side as well as on the bottom. We can use these scroll bars in order to pan our image, but it's probably easier if we tap the H key or we select the hand tool from the toolbar. Now I can click, and if I want to kind of flick with the mouse, so I click and then let go of the mouse, we can see that Photoshop doesn't stop right when I release the cursor. And this is called flick panning. And it enables us to go rather far in our image. If you don't like that behavior, you can click and drag and then you stop moving the mouse and then release your cursor. And that will enable you to go to an exact position. Now, what if we have another tool selected? I'll choose the Move tool. And if I want to temporarily access the Hand tool, I can hold down the space bar. So now I can reposition my image within that preview window without actually changing tools. When I release the space bar, it returns to the previously selected tool. If I can't remember the keyboard shortcuts to fit on screen or to zoom to 100%, We can also double-click on the hand tool in order to fit on screen, or double-click the zoom tool to zoom in to 100%. Now, what if we're working with multiple images open? I'll use the window menu and then choose arrange, and let's tile these two up vertical. We can see down here in the status bar that they have different zoom percentages. The first one's at 100%, and this one's at 50%. If I want to match the zoom percentage, we can use the Window menu and then Arrange, and we can match not only the zoom, but also the location, rotation, and all of these things. I'll choose Match All. And now if I tap H to get the Hand tool, and we select the Zabriskie point image, if I want to scroll all of my windows, I can enable that by checking that on the Options bar, or we can leave it unchecked and just add the Shift key. So now when I pan, I'm going to pan all of my open documents. Likewise, if I tap Z to select the Zoom tool and I hold down the Shift key, Photoshop will zoom all of the documents. If we add the Option key on Mac or the Alt key on Windows to the Shift key, then we can zoom out on all of our documents at one time. All right, if I wanted to consolidate these back to tabs, we could use the window menu or I can just drag the tab of one document and when I position it on top of another document, we see that cyan or blue outline telling me that when I release the cursor, they will be nested back together. All right, Photoshop also has a number of ways to display images in the interface called screen modes. We can access these under the view menu and then screen mode and then choose from the three different modes. But we can also access them using the toolbar. Now to make them easier to see because they're way down here at the bottom, I'm going to click on the chevrons in the upper left of the toolbar in order to view this as a two column view. This is the icon for the screen views. And when I select it, we can see that there's a keyboard shortcut that goes along with them. So now if I were to just tap the F key, That would take me from the regular screen mode to full screen with the menu bars. So we still have the menu bars up here, but we have a little bit more screen real estate because we don't have those scroll bars. I'll hold down the space bar in order to reposition this. We can see that we have that space not only on the bottom, but also on the right-hand side. If I press F again, then I go to full screen without the menu bars. And this is excellent for presentations. I'll use command zero in order to zoom in to fit on screen. In full screen without menu bars, you can show your panels by tapping the tab key. I'll tap it again to hide it, or we can just position our cursor over to the side of the display and the toolbar will pop out. I could select another tool and then when I move my cursor away, it will auto hide. We can do the same thing for the panels on the right side, just positioning the cursor close to the edge of the display that will pop out the panels and then moving our cursor away, we'll hide them again. All right, I could tap F again to cycle through the screen modes or we can tap the Escape key in order to escape out of this and I'll tap the Tab key in order to view our panels and tools. I'll go ahead and click on the chevron to return to a one-column toolbar, and I'll click on the chevron here on the second row of panels in order to collapse them. Then we can go ahead and close these files. And as you can see, there are a variety of different ways to zoom, pan, and view your images. It's good to know that they all exist so that you can find the method that works the best for you.

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