You never forget your first voyage into the great seas of graphics navigation. Mine was in 1985. I was using MacPaint, my supposed (but entirely fictional) mastery of which helped me land my first design job. I was panning an image using the scroll bars and a coworker, horrified by my behavior, showed me a trick: Hold down the Option key to get what he called “Muffy.” While I found it troubling that he’d invented a pet name for something that looked and worked like a hand—did he have a nickname for his actual hand?—I had to admit, I was amazed. It had never occurred to me that such a tool (otherwise unavailable in the software) so much as existed, let alone might save me so much effort.

In creating Photoshop, Adobe “borrowed” the hand tool. But it assigned a different shortcut: the spacebar. Which just so happens to be the biggest key on the keyboard. It’s as if Adobe was saying, this tool needs a shortcut more than all the others. And I couldn’t agree more.

But the hand tool is just the beginning. There’s the zoom tool, the nudge tricks, the scroll wheel, the rotate view tool, the full-screen mode, and more. And every one of them is made possible by pressing a few keys and occasionally clicking.

For those who may be curious, the enormous panorama used in this week’s video is file #15281209 from Serge Ramelli of the Fotolia image library. For an exclusive dekeOnline deal, click this link.

This Week’s Winner, Next Week’s Hint

This week’s Photoshop Top 40: The Final 10 Contest winner is Jessica Boucher of Brooklyn, NY, who exactly nailed Feature #4, “Navigation.” Congratulations, Jessica!

Now it’s time to guess Feature #3. Hint: This one command gives you ultimate control over your pixels. Keep an eye out for my newsletter in your email inbox.

Big New Prizes

This week I really ramp things up with an expanded prize package valued at more than $2,000. Said prizes include a Wacom Intuos4 pen tablet, a year’s membership to the National Association of Photoshop Professionals, and your very own copy of Adobe Photoshop CS4. (Yes, I do mean the actual shipping software!) And as if that weren’t enough, I’ve got a brand new piece of software for you called Magic Bullet PhotoLooks. And I’m really impressed by this one: Created by visual effects expert Stu Maschwitz, PhotoLooks lets you prioritize effects in a traditional capture-and-develop sequence, permitting you to create real-world interactions. Priced at just $199, PhotoLooks offers a powerful 32-bit imaging environment that takes up where Photoshop leaves off.

And that’s just half the prizes! You’ll also get $100 in Fotolia credits, two of my One-on-One books, a month subscription to lynda.com, annual subscriptions to How and Print magazines, and the amazing Genuine Fractals 6 from onOne Software.

Photoshop Top 40 is available as a downloadable podcast from iTunes. Click here to subscribe.

Best of luck on Feature #3!