Learn Photoshop in 30 days - Part 2 Photoshop Express Prabhas Joshi prabhas@desdevpro.com http://www.desdevpro.com 28 August 2009 Photoshop Tutorial This new series will teach you the essential basics of Photoshop CS3 in 30 short, easy to follow tutorials. You require no prior knowledge of the software. Familiarity with Windows is assumed. Navigating in Photoshop Hello friends, in the previous part, we discussed a little about documents and saving them. Today I'll teach you about how to navigate around this document so that you can go from one part to another. Navigation is basically divided into 2 aspects: Zooming [+,-]: which means enlarging/ some part of the image Panning Navigator Palette We'll also have a look at the the naviagtor palette. To put all of this stuff into practice, let's start with opening a big image. Download some big image from [images.google.com] or if you already have it, great. 1] Start off with opening photoshop. Goto file>open. We see the following dialog box coming up: 002_img1.gif As shown choose the large image file which you have by navigating around and press open. 002_img2.jpg As we open it, we see a problem- that we cant see the whole part of the image at 100% [The exact thing!]- If we try zooming the image to 100%, then we can see only a part of the image- it fills the whole screen. And if we view it @ a smaller zoom-percent, then it is not visible clearly. Do you think now you can make some relationships between Image size, resolution and the viewing or zooming? To solve this problem, we have 2 tools we can use: 1] The zoom tool - which can be seen as icon on the left-bottom side of the default layout. See the bottom of the toolBox. 002_img3.gif Just click on that zoom-tool that "magnifying glass" looking thingy. Done. good. Now, with the zoom tool selected- your icon changes to a magnifying glass with a "+" sign in it. This shows that we'll zoom into the image and make the part where we click-bigger. Wanna try it. just click somewhere in the image and Voila!, we see that the we are going inside the image to see the more minute details- thats zooming into the image. Now to zoom out, either- go over to the top- and press the zoom-out button. 002_img4.gif Have a look @ the results. Lemme show you some images to demonstrate this 002_img5.gif 002_img6.gif Quick Tip The shortcut for Zoom tool in Photoshop is 'z'- press it and you automatically get that tool. To go back to normal- press 'v' Try doing this Zooming-in | Zooming-out exercise for different parts of the image. But, now there's a problem. What is it??? When we are on 1 part of the image- how do we see the other parts at the same magnification. Well, I have a solution to that- the hand tool. You see that hand-looking thing on the lower part of the toolbox- select it. You can even press "h" - which is a shortcut for the hand tool. 002_img7.gif Now to test that press [ ctrl and "+" - shortcut to zoom in ] to increase magnification to around 300% - 400% - such that you cant see whole of the image- only a part of it. Select the hand-tool OR press 'h'. Note: Pressing "H" or "h" are equivalent- case doesnt makes any difference Now with your cursor transformed as a hand, try dragging the mouse on the image- we can actually pan it- go from 1 part to another. Try playing with this tool for sometime. Now, having covered 2 important aspects of today's tute- we'll go over to the ultimate navigation tool: The navigation pallette - which is on the top left side with a red colored boundary over the image. Just have a look: 002_img8.jpg Now go over to that palette, and 1] Press Ctrl, and while still pressing it down- drag your mouse to create a marquee and release the mouse- we see that marquee we created has been magnified in the original image. 2] Now try dragging that red boundary- we see that, as we are moving the red-box, the part of the original magnified image is changing- real cool navigation, huh? See this image for demonstrating: 002_img9.gif Btw, check out those 2 triangles at the bottom of the palette. Find out what they are for? Thats it for today- try revising navigation on different images- and make yourself habitual. Good luck!