PS CS4: What's New — Navigation

Major overhauls here, mostly to do with the Hand and Zoom tools so let's get right to it.

Panning and Zooming Preferences

Take a look in the General section of the Preferences dialog box — Photoshop > Preferences > General (Mac) or Edit > Preferences > General (Win). You'll find three new options available: Animated Zoom, Zoom Clicked Point to Center, and Enable Flick Panning.

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Animated Zoom

With this preference turned on, when you zoom, it will be smooth — like the effect you would see when zooming with a camera lens.

This may not work on your machine, however. It depends on your video card. This function uses a lot of processing power and older video cards just can't handle it.

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Zoom Clicked Point to Center

This is a pretty handy function. When you want to zoom in on one particular part of your image, select the Zoom Tool (press the Z key), and click where you want to zoom in.

The first click can't put the spot exactly in the center because of image size constraints, but once there's enough "room" to reposition, the clicked spot will center.

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Enable Flick Panning

With Flick Panning enabled, you add momentum effects to your panning. If you've tried out Google Earth, you know what I mean.

Clicking the Space Bar to get the Hand Tool, click and drag and image to pan up/down, right/left, whatever. Release the click when the image is still moving and it will slowly continue panning in that direction. Click once anywhere in the image to stop the panning.

Panning and Zooming Options

Continuous Zooming

With the Zoom Tool active, click and hold anywhere in the image and it will zoom until you release the click.

To zoom back out again, hold down the Option key (Mac) or Alt key (Win) and do the click-hold.

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Pixel Grid

If your image is zoomed up to at least 600%, select View > Show > Pixel Grid and a grid will be laid down showing each pixel in the image.

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Zoom Shortcuts

The keyboard shortcut for zooming up to what's called actual pixels, 100%, has changed. Although the usual Option-Cmd-0 (Mac) and Alt-Cntl-0 (Win) still works, it's now Cmd-1 (Mac) or Cntl-1 (Win). I've switched already as it's just easier.

The reason for the change was to put Photoshop more in line with InDesign and Illustrator.

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Fill Screen

When the Hand or Zoom Tools are active, there is now a Fill Screen button in the Options bar at the top. It does what it says; whatever the screen size, the image will zoom to fill it. This may be at the expense of losing some of it (top/bottom or left/right).

In contrast, the usual old Fit Screen button simply fits the image with no loss of viewing.

Gesture Support

Yes, using gestures for zooming, scrolling, and rotating has now come to Photoshop. A couple of caveats, however. First, if you use a Windows system, well...forget it. In fact, it only works on certain Mac models like the MacBook, for example