Zoom, pan and fit the canvas in Easel by Zaweba
Zoom in and out, fit the canvas, view actual pixels and hold Space to pan in Easel by Zaweba. How to move around a painting without losing your place.
Painting means moving between the whole picture and a tiny corner of it, over and over. A good painter steps close for the eye in a portrait, steps back to see the whole face, and does it dozens of times an hour. In Easel by Zaweba, zoom, pan and fit are how you make those moves on screen.
The four controls
Zoom in and out changes how close you are. Fit the canvas shows the whole picture in the window. Actual pixels shows the picture at one screen pixel per image pixel. Holding Space pans, so you can drag the canvas around while zoomed in, then let go to carry on painting.
These are simple, but using them well makes a big difference to how comfortable painting feels.
When to zoom in
Zoom in for detail. Eyes, lettering, fine lines with a rigger or a mapping nib, small highlights with a cotton bud. Zooming in makes your hand movements smaller relative to the picture, which gives more control.
The mahl stick helps here too. It steadies your hand for fine work, and the two together are the way to paint small, precise marks.
When to fit
Fit the canvas often. It is the screen version of standing back from the easel. Most problems in a painting are about the big picture, values, composition and balance, and you can only see those when the whole thing is in view.
Step back goes a step further, showing the picture from a distance. Fit is the quick everyday version.
Actual pixels
Actual pixels shows exactly what the picture looks like at its real resolution. That matters for two things. First, it shows detail truthfully, without the smoothing or roughness that other zoom levels introduce. Second, it gives you a sense of how the picture will look when exported at 1x.
Remember that canvas size is set in millimetres and DPI when you start, from 72 to 300 DPI, so a large print sized canvas will be much bigger than your screen at actual pixels. That's normal.
Panning with Space
Holding Space pans. It is one of the default keyboard shortcuts, and it is quicker than reaching for scroll bars. Hold it, drag, let go, paint. With practice it becomes as natural as moving a sheet of paper on a desk.
Put the controls together and a rhythm many painters fall into appears. Fit to block in the big shapes. Zoom in a little for the middle stage. Zoom right in for the final details. Fit again regularly to check the whole. Use Space to move between areas without zooming out.
Avoiding the zoomed in trap
The biggest risk of zooming is spending too long close up. Hours spent perfecting a detail at high zoom often produce a picture that looks fussy from a normal distance. A good rule is to fit the canvas every few minutes, and never to finish an area without seeing it at full view.
On very large canvases, panning around at high zoom can feel slow on a modest graphics card. Easel runs on the graphics card, and if frames come late it lets wet paint move a little slower instead of letting your drawing lag. Zooming out a little often makes things feel smoother. With these habits, moving around a painting in Easel by Zaweba becomes something you hardly notice.
