In this lesson video, we are going to cover how to navigate around the canvas such as panning, zooming, and rotating the canvas in Krita there are many methods to navigate the canvas, you can use the UI buttons, or using the keyboard only, or using the mouse with combination of keyboard modifier key. Also, you can use the spacebar key oriented navigation, which is a legacy model from Photoshop. This will be helpful for those of you come from Photoshop background. If we use drawing tablet, we can configure it to use any existing keyboard and mouse interaction. So essentially, any navigation control using a drawing tablet is just a replacement of the original keyboard and mouse methods. But there is one method for navigation which is unique to some drawing tablet and that will be using the hand gesture.

Some drawing tablets have hardware support For resuming by simply pinching the tablet surface with two fingers, or to rotate or to pan around with it. Unfortunately, by the time I record this video Krita is not fully supporting this input method yet. There are reports in the forums that Krita do have partial support on this method, such as pinch to zoom is working, but Canvas rotation is not. Also currently, I don't have any drawing tablet that support hand gestures to test it myself. So we need to skip this method for now. Okay, to learn to navigate the canvas, we need some kind of image in our canvas.

If we only have white color like this, it is really hard to spot any changes that happen on the canvas. So let's open an image. Go to File Menu, open and find any image you already have. Okay? If you have a file open like this, the term Canvas is this visible rectangular area. Anything outside this canvas area will be invisible.

But you need to know that Krita and most graphic software exists in the world able to store images outside the canvas area. If you see the image in their native formats, we have support layers. But if you export or save the image in common file formats that do not support layers, such as JPEG, or PNG, etc, anything outside the canvas area will be discarded. Okay. The next important thing I need to point out is that Canvas navigation will not actually transform the image. What we are about to cover in this lesson is just navigation, not transformation.

The image will not change at all. What we are doing is simply changing the way we see the canvas okay. First, let's see how we can zoom in and out the canvas. To zoom using the UI buttons, we can click and drag this slider in here. If you hover on this area, and then click, we can type in any zoom factor we want to use. Or you can click on this pulldown List button and choose any predefined zoom factor value, such as 100%.

In here, another UI approach of zooming in and out is by using the right click method. But in order to do this, you need to be in brush mode. So just make sure you have the brush tool active in here. Or you can also use other brush related tools, which are all of these tools in here. Okay, if we have one of these selected the field right click, we will see this cool pop up palette. Okay, so this floating thing we see in here is called the Papa pellet.

In a Papa pellet, we can drag this slider to zoom in and out of the canvas. And this button in here is for quickly resetting the zoom factor back to 100%. Next, still in UI category, we can use this Zoom tool to zoom in and out. So let's click on this tool while this is active, if we do left click, it will zoom in. To zoom out, you need to hold the Ctrl key on the keyboard. Notice the minus symbol appear on the mouse cursor, and if we click the canvas will zoom out.

Okay, next, let's see how we can zoom with the keyboard. To zoom in, we can press the plus symbol on the keyboard, and to zoom out, we can press the minus symbol. If we want to reset the zoom to 100%, we can press the number one key. You can also press number two if you want to zoom x 10 so we can see the whole canvas and number three if you want to fit the width of the canvas refers to the view. Okay, next, we can also zoom in and out using our mouse scroll wheel. So scroll up to zoom in and scroll down to zoom out.

To pan around the canvas using the UI, we can either use this horizontal track bar, or the vertical track bar. We can also use the pen tool, which is this tool that has a hand symbol. Okay, to pan around using the mouse only, you can click and drag using the middle mouse button. If you have a standard mouse to access the middle mouse button is to actually pressing the scroll wheel, not rotating it, but pressing it down. This method is perhaps the easiest and the fastest method to pan around using the mouse. To rotate the canvas using the UI, you can open the pop up palette.

Remember the popup palette can also The accessed if you are in one of the brush based tools, right click to open the pop up palette. Notice we can see this large ring, we can click and drag this node to rotate the canvas to reset the rotation, so our canvas is back to its normal orientation, we can click on this small circle at the top. If you want to rotate the canvas with keyboard keys only, you can press number six to rotate the canvas clockwise and press four to rotate the canvas counterclockwise. If you want to reset the canvas orientation, you can press the number five key. You can also hold the Ctrl key and then press closing and opening bracket keys to rotate the canvas. Next, for mouse interaction, we can hold the shift key and then click drag with the middle mouse button.

If you are coming from Photoshop, you may already be familiar Hillier with the spacebar oriented navigation critter support this type of navigation also, but with a slight difference, and that is in Krita, the spacebar navigation support Canvas rotation. So how can we use this method, First, you need to press and hold the spacebar key. Notice by doing that, even if you are in brush to mode or in any other tool originally by holding the spacebar key Krita will be in temporal Pen Tool mode. As we can see the cursor change to a hand cursor. While in this mode, we can click and drag our mouse to pan around. Okay, next to zoom in and out, we can hold the spacebar key again and then hold also the control key.

Notice we get this zoom mouse cursor to zoom in and out in this mode, we can click and drag with our mouse up and down, up to zoom In and down to zoom out. Okay. Now to rotate the canvas, we can hold spacebar and shift at the same time, and then click drag with our mouse. Okay, now we can add snapping behavior by adding the alt modifier key. So to zoom in and out with a snap feature, hold spacebar Ctrl and alt keys together and click drag with our mouse, we can see the zooming motion is stepped. So we can snap to 100% easily with this method to rotate the canvas with snapping, hold spacebar, Shift and Alt keys together and then click drag with our mouse.

We can see that with this method, we can snap to zero degree or the default orientation easier. Okay, guys, so those are the methods we can use to navigate the canvas. In Krita, now, you might be wondering which method should I use? Personally, I will stay away from any UI based interaction, because they are just too slow to perform. My suggestion is, if you are using Photoshop, I mean, you are constantly moving back and forth between Krita in Photoshop or even Adobe Illustrator for example, then you might want to stick with the spacebar based interaction, because you already develop the muscle memory for this interaction. So why not just keep using it.

But if you're new to Krita and never used Photoshop before, and you don't have any plan to use it, then I suggest you to use the middle mouse button based interaction for navigation, because this is the fastest method with the list button combination to memorize. So again, just to recap, middle mouse button to pan around Shift and middle mouse button for rotating the canvas and control middle mouse button or scroll wheel for zooming in and out. The downside with the middle mouse based interaction is you don't have a snap functionality, but you can still use number five in the keyboard to reset the canvas rotation and number one, two, and three to control the zoom quickly. The last technique of Canvas navigation we are going to discuss is mirroring. Again, this is just a navigation technique. So the image is not really flipped at all.

It is just how we see the image that is being flipped. So to mirror the view, we can use the M letter key for the shortcut to refer back to the original view. We can press M again, if you forget the shortcut, you can go to View Menu canvas and then choose mirror view in here.