Let us start things off by opening this image right here. It is called picturepuzzlehi.jpeg, and it is inside the lesson four folder which is inside the part one folder, which is inside the project files folder that you install from this DVD series to your hard drive. And this happens to be a scan of a piece line art that I drew years and years ago, almost 20 years ago now, back when I was a lad doing illustration for in this case, a local restaurant actually. And this is a little picture puzzle cartoon that spells out this long elaborate quote. Pretty famous quote from Samuel Butler as it turns out.
But in any case, this serves as a useful example for learning how to navigate inside Photoshop because it such an enormous scan, such a big high resolution scan where zoomed way, way out. When we first open up the image, it ends up being zoomed pretty far out.
Now in my case, it opens up at the 8.33% zoom ratio as we can see inside the title bar here. An 8.33% turns out to be the same as the fraction 1/12. So, we are seeing 1/12 of the horizontal pixels inside this image, and 1/12 of the vertical pixels inside this image, which means we are only seeing one out of every 144 pixels inside this image. So, we are seeing just a merest fraction of the detail inside this image.
That allows us to take in the entire image in one viewing. However, we cannot see the real detail inside the image, and the quality, so far as were sort of ascertaining it on screen here really suffers as a result.
To zoom in to the image and see it in more clarity less of the image at the time but more clarity in terms of the details that we do see, you go up to the View Menu and you can choose the zoom in command, which also has a keyboard shortcut that I recommend you learn, which is Command Plus (+) on the Macintosh side, or Ctrl Plus (+) on the PC. And now, go ahead and zoom you in.
And everytime you press Command Plus (+) or Ctrl Plus (+), you are going to zoom in not much more. And as it turns out, every other zoom ratio is a good one like 25% is good, it is nice and soft on screen. It is smooth on screen that is called anti-aliasing for what is worth. But if I zoom into the 33% zoom ration, it is kind of jagged, not very representative of the actual transitions of the lines inside the image. Command Plus (+) again gets us to 50%; that is a good one. So, every other one is a good one. And then the best one is if I zoom in all the way to a 100%.
So, there we are at the 100% zoom ratio. We can see the pixels as they actually exist. Now, the zoom out, you press Command Minus (-) or Ctrl Minus (-) on the PC. And each time you press the keyboard shortcut, you zoom out incrementally.
Now, the one thing about the keyboard shortcuts, Command Plus, Command Minus is that they center the zoom. So, they are only zooming into or out from the center of the image or the center of what you are seeing on screen.
What if you want to center something else like what if I want to check out what the heck is going on with these feet down there?
Well, I have to use the zoom tool and there is a zoom tool over here at the toolbox which you can select, and then click with the tool on the portion of the image that you want to zoom. But, what people do once they get pretty familiar with Photoshop, the easier way to work is just to take advantage of the cross application Adobe Keyboard Shortcuts, which are -- I will switch to a different tool to so that we can see them, which are Command Spacebar on the Mac or Ctrl Spacebar click to zoom in. Option Spacebar or Alt Spacebar click to zoom out, okay? And that allows you to specify exactly which portion of the image you want to zoom into.
For example, I am Command Spacebar clicking on the feet to zoom well into those feet, or Option Spacebar clicking on the feet to zoom out from the feet and keep them at the center of my zoomed window.
You can also -- this is pretty cool, if you want to zoom in pretty radically in one fell sloop, you can with Ctrl and Spacebar down or Command and Spacebar here on the Mac. You can drag around the detail that you want to zoom like this plus (+) sign up toward the top of the screen, and then I will zoom in exactly on that detail.
Other ways to zoom, just so you know are to double click on the zoom tool, which will take you out to exactly the 100% zoom size, or double click on the hand tool, which takes you out to the fit in window size, whatever that happens to be for me in this case, it happens to be a .67%.
All right, let us zoom in on the detail this image here. I will just Command Spacebar drag around the queen here, and you can tell this is pretty simple to figure out. This is K plus queen, minus QU, that is kin just to give you a sense of how to solve this puzzle in case you get it in your head that you want to do such a thing.
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