Moving around the canvas

Pan, zoom, rotate and mirror the view: with the mouse, the trackpad, the keyboard, the Navigator panel, or the Hand, Zoom and Rotate View tools.

Nothing you do on this page changes your artwork. Panning, zooming, rotating, flipping and the black and white view only change what you see, and none of it reaches the export.

Every gesture here works under every tool, so you never have to swap tools to reposition the canvas.

Panning#

Hold Space and drag with the left button. The cursor becomes an open hand while Space is held, and a closed one while you drag. Dragging with the middle mouse button does the same thing without the keyboard. Either way, a pan that starts over the canvas keeps tracking even if the cursor wanders onto a docked panel.

The Hand tool (H) is the same pan on the left button, for tablets and pens where a middle button or a spare hand is awkward. It has no options and no other action.

Zooming#

On Windows and Linux the mouse wheel zooms, centred on the cursor, so the point under the pointer stays put. One notch is a step of about 1.1x. Zoom runs from 5% to 10000%.

On macOS the wheel and the trackpad follow the system convention instead: a two-finger scroll pans horizontally and vertically, a pinch zooms around the cursor, and Command with the wheel zooms as a fallback for an external mouse. There is no setting to swap these behaviours. They follow the platform.

The zoom box at the right end of the bar above the canvas shows the current level and opens a list of presets: 10, 25, 50, 75, 100, 150, 200, 300, 400 and 800 per cent, applied around the centre of the view. From the keyboard, Ctrl+= and Ctrl+- step by 1.25x each press; those two stop at 3200% and 5%.

Ctrl+1 jumps to 100%. Ctrl+0 fits the canvas to the window, and also resets the view rotation to zero. Ctrl+Shift+0 is Fit Selection: it frames only what you have selected, so the selected layers fill the view instead of the whole canvas.

Continuous zoom#

Hold Shift and Space and drag left or right: right zooms in, left zooms out. The zoom is anchored on the point where you pressed, so that point stays under the cursor, and it grows by the same ratio for the same hand movement at any level: about 260 pixels of drag doubles the zoom, whether you start at 10% or at 400%. It works under every tool.

The Zoom tool#

The Zoom tool (Z) does the same drag on a plain left button. A click without dragging steps in by about 1.4x around the point you clicked, and Alt+click steps out. Hold Z instead of tapping it and the tool is only borrowed: zoom, let go of Z, and the tool you were using comes straight back.

Rotating the view#

Hold Ctrl and Space and drag to spin the canvas around its centre: useful for drawing a curve at a comfortable wrist angle. The Rotate View tool (R) does the same on a plain left-drag, and keeps tracking if you drag out over a panel. Rotation is absolute from the moment you press, so the canvas follows your hand rather than accelerating.

There is no angle snap while rotating. To straighten up, click the reset-rotation button on the bar above the canvas, or press Ctrl+0 to fit, which also clears the rotation.

Flipping the view#

Two buttons on the bar above the canvas, Flip View Horizontal and Flip View Vertical, mirror what you see. Animators use this the way illustrators use a mirror: a face that looked right suddenly reveals its lean, and a pose reads as unbalanced the moment you flip it.

The flip is display only. Your layers are untouched, the mouse still lands where it appears to, and the project renders and exports unflipped whether the buttons are on or off. Both flips can be on at once, and each stays on until you switch it off.

The Navigator panel#

Window ▸ Navigator opens a small picture of the whole canvas with the part you are looking at outlined. Click anywhere in the picture, or drag the outline, to move the view there. The mouse wheel over the picture zooms the canvas.

Below the picture sit the view controls in one place: a zoom slider with minus and plus buttons, a rotation slider whose two buttons turn the view to the next 15 degree step, and a row with the zoom box, Fit, Reset Rotation, the two Flip View buttons and Black and White View. All but the last are the same controls as on the bar above the canvas, so both always agree.

Black and white view#

Black and White View, the last button on the Navigator's row, shows the canvas without colour so you can check your values: whether light and dark read clearly on their own. Ctrl+Shift+Y turns it on and off from anywhere, with the Navigator open or closed. The Navigator's picture turns black and white with it. It is display only: your colours, the render and every export stay in colour. It is not saved, so it is off again the next time you start the app.

A reference shown on the canvas from the References panel turns black and white along with your artwork. The References panel also has its own Black and White View for the pictures inside it.

The default workspaces give the Navigator a place of its own. In a layout you saved before it existed, it joins the Color panel's group as a tab the first time you open it, and after that it stays wherever you move it. In the 3D view its controls grey out, because that view is an orbit camera rather than a pan and zoom of the canvas.

When navigation is locked#

Camera View frames whatever the camera sees, so panning and zooming are switched off there. Move the camera instead. The 3D view has its own navigation and ignores these gestures too.

The wheel is also ignored while you are dragging something on the canvas, so a stray notch mid-move cannot zoom out from under you.

Each open document keeps its own pan and zoom. Switch tabs and come back, and the view is exactly where you left it.