Zoom, pan, rotate and flip the view in Paint
Move around a picture in Paint by Zaweba with scrubby zoom, the Hand tool, Rotate View, Flip View and the Navigator panel, without changing a pixel.
Most of the time spent in an editor is spent looking, and moving the view well is a skill in itself. Paint by Zaweba has the Zoom and Hand tools, Rotate View, Flip View and the Navigator panel. None of them changes the picture. They change how you see it, which is often exactly what a drawing or a retouch needs.
Zooming and panning
The Zoom tool has a Scrubby zoom option. With it on, you zoom smoothly by dragging. With it off, you drag a rectangle and the view zooms to that rectangle. Scrubby zoom is quick and fluid for painting. The rectangle is better when you want to land precisely on a small area, such as an eye in a portrait or a single letter in a logo.
Zoom in for detail work, but come back out often. Retouching at high magnification for too long is how blemish removal turns into plastic skin.
The Hand tool slides the picture around inside the window. It is the natural partner to zooming in: zoom to the area, pan along it as you work. With a pen, panning feels like moving a sheet of paper on a desk, which is why many people use it far more than the scroll bars.
Rotating the view
Rotate View turns the canvas on screen. You can type an angle, or use the buttons for 0, 90, 180 and minus 90 degrees. The same thing is in View > Rotate View to Angle.
This is for drawing and painting comfort. Your hand makes better curves in some directions than others, so turning the canvas to suit the stroke gives smoother lines. Many artists rotate constantly while inking. Because only the view rotates, the image itself stays exactly as it was, and the 0 button brings it upright again.
Flipping the view
View > Flip View Horizontal mirrors what you see without changing the file. It is a classic check for drawings and portraits. After staring at a face for an hour your eye adapts to its mistakes, and a mirrored view shows them at once: a tilted mouth, eyes at different heights, a lean in a building. In Paint by Zaweba painting still works while the view is flipped, so you can fix the problem in the mirrored view and flip back.
Do it often. Flipping every few minutes is a habit worth more than any brush setting.
The Navigator panel
The Navigator shows the whole picture in a small panel. Keep it open whenever you work zoomed in, so you always see the overall effect of a change while your main view shows detail. When you are cleaning dust off a large scan, the Navigator is how you keep a sense of the whole while your eyes are on one corner.
A rhythm that works
For a painting: zoom so the area you are working on fills the screen, rotate to suit the stroke, paint, then return to 0 and flip the view to check. For a photo retouch: keep the Navigator open, work zoomed in with the Hand tool for panning, and zoom out every so often to judge the whole frame.
Avoiding confusion
The usual worry is that a picture has been changed when only the view has. If something looks mirrored or tilted, check Rotate View and Flip View before you look anywhere else. They belong to the view, not to the pixels, so they cannot spoil an exported image.
Moving the view freely is half of working comfortably, and Paint by Zaweba keeps every one of these moves close at hand.
