- [Instructor] In this movie, I'll show you
how to take advantage of continuous animated zooming,
which is a function of the new GPU performance function
here inside Illustrator.
So, we're getting into a little bit of early technical
information, but it's important stuff,
as you're about to see.
So, first the feature.
What you do is select the zoom tool,
or just go ahead and press the control and space bar keys
here on the PC, or command and space bar on the Mac.
And then click and drag, and if you drag to the right,
you're going to zoom in continuously as we're seeing right here
and notice that I end up with a custom zoom level,
in my case of 178.99%.
You're results of course are going to vary
depending on how far you drag to the right.
And you can continue to take advantage of that feature
just by once again pressing the control and space bar keys
that's command and space bar on the Mac,
and then again dragging to the right.
If you want to zoom out, and you can do this on the fly
before you release the keys, you just go ahead
and drag to the left instead, and notice that your cursor
changes to a magnifying glass
with a minus sign inside of it.
There's no need to press the alt key or the option key
in order to take advantage of this trick.
So you're just dragging to the right to zoom in,
and dragging to the left to zoom out.
Now, one of the really fun things about this feature
is that you don't have to keep the keys down,
so watch this.
I'm going to go ahead and zoom in on David's eye here
by pressing the control and space bar keys,
that's the command and space bar keys on the Mac,
and I'll begin dragging to the right,
and now I have released the keys.
I still have the mouse button down,
but I'm no longer pressing any keys,
and now I can just drag to the left to zoom out,
or the right to zoom in, and I can do it as quickly,
or slowly as I like.
So it's a pretty great feature, once you get used to it.
Now let's say you prefer the old behavior.
And by old behavior, let me show you.
I'll go ahead and press controls here,
or command zero on the Mac,
to fit the active artboard on the screen.
And then I'll go up to this little rocket ship icon,
which is located in a separate bar above the menu bar
on the Mac over here in the upper left corner.
In any event, notice when you hover over the rocket ship
it tells you that GPU performance is enabled as by default.
Just go ahead and click on the icon to bring up
the preferences dialog box.
And notice that in my case I have
a total of three check boxes.
One for GPU performance,
we'll come back to that in a moment.
One for animated zoom, which is that feature
we were just seeing.
And then many of us have enhance thin lines,
which you're only going to see that check box if you're
working with very specific varieties of NVIDEA cards.
That is, a display card that's created by NVIDEA,
such as the professional grade Quadro series,
which are generally considered to be the best
graphic cards on the market.
And what this little checkbox does is it makes
faint lines thicker when you're zoomed
way out from a document.
It's hardly worth showing, it's a very subtle feature,
and you can check that out on your own,
if you're interested, but this guy's very important.
For now, I'm going to go ahead and turn it off
so that we can see the alternative.
And now click okay.
Alright now notice what happens when I press
the control and space bar keys,
that's command and space bar on the Mac.
And I drag inside of David's face.
This time instead of zooming in when I drag to the right,
I draw a rectangular marquis, and then as soon as I release,
I zoom in on that marquis'd area.
And again you still get a custom zoom level.
In my case 763.46%, and it's a little bit less
ambiguous because you know exactly the detail
that you're zoomed in on.
And now, if that's not the area that I want,
I'll just go ahead and control alt space bar click,
that'd be a command option space bar click on the Mac
to zoom out, and then I would just go ahead
and control space bar, or command space bar drag
around a different detail,
such as this orange leaf ornament.
So it's up to you how you decide to work.
But this old school technique, this is the way it's worked
inside of Illustrator for just about ever.
Allows you to zoom very quickly in on tiny,
itty bitty details like my bacteria right here,
my little blue bacteria.
So now, if I control space bar, or command space bar drag
around it, I'm able to see it nice and big as well.
So, totally up to you.
Now one addition thing I want to mention here,
and by the way, I just pressed control zero,
or command zero on the Mac twice to zoom
way too far out, I don't know what that was about,
and then I just pressed the keyboard shortcut again
to zoom in on the active artboard.
The thing about this whole GPU performance function,
which is ultimately drawing a preview of your illustration
using the functions on your video card,
which allow Illustrator to draw more quickly
and more smoothly, the thing is that it is a new feature,
and it doesn't always work the way you want it to.
For example, just the other night I was using Illustrator
on my MacBook Pro, and for whatever reason,
when I zoomed in on David, his eyes disappeared,
and he had a bunch of scribbles across his face.
I'm totally serious, and that's the kind of stuff
you can run into.
If you encounter that problem, then you can turn off
the GPU preview temporarily by going to the view menu
and choosing preview on CPU, which allows your computer
to be in charge of the preview instead.
And that will take care of the problem.
That will also however make your placed images
look more choppy, and in order to see what that looks like,
I'm going to go ahead and bring up
the art boards panel once again by going to the window menu
and choosing art boards.
And then I'll go ahead and double click on art board five
right here in order to switch to that art board
and fit it on screen as well.
And notice how choppy these transitions are.
This is an image that I created inside of Photoshop,
hence these photographic details right here.
And so notice if I start zooming in
by pressing control plus or command plus on the Mac,
things start to get a little less jagged on screen,
but they're still pretty jagged.
I don't know if you can make that out.
Whereas, if I return to the view menu
and choose GPU preview this time,
so that command toggles back and forth,
now we're ending up with a much smoother display
of this imported image at all kinds of zoom levels.
So the new GPU preview function does have its advantages.
Alright, I'm going to do one last thing.
I'm going to go ahead and click on the rocket ship once again
in order to bring up this panel,
the preferences dialog box.
I'm going to turn animated zoom back on
because I actually like that feature,
but I do want you to know one more thing.
If your previews are looking bad chronically,
if they keep looking bad from one illustration to another,
you've got three options, one of which is to update
the driver for your video card, and you'll have to look
up how to do that online.
Another is to quit Illustrator and then restart
the program, and see if things get better.
That often takes care of problems.
And then finally, if you just can't get the darn
thing to work, you can turn off GPU performance.
And that's going to make your imported images
look jagged, and it may slow things
down a little bit as well.
But it will insure that all of your images
look the way they're intended to.
In any event, I'm going to turn that back on.
I'm going to leave animated zoom turned on as my default.
And then I'll click okay in order to accept that change.
And that's how you take advantage of the new
continuous animated zoom, as well as exploit
the powers of GPU performance here inside Illustrator.