Handling the Hand tool in Photoshop

The Hand tool helps you to quickly move around in an image document. The Hand tool works similarly to a scroll bar, but you’ll probably find the scroll bar to be more efficient. The Hand tool is more of a function than an actual tool because you rarely need to click the Hand tool to use it. Simply press the spacebar while using any other tool, and the cursor changes into the Hand icon, enabling you to move the image around in its window by dragging.
Here are some tips for using this tool:

-->Press H to activate the tool: To activate the Hand tool without clicking its icon on the Tools palette, just press the H key.

-->Use the Options bar to change the size of a window: When the Hand tool is active, the Actual Pixels, Fit on Screen, and Print Size buttons appear in the Options bar. Click these buttons to enlarge or reduce the image window so the whole image fits in the window; make the document as large as it can be in your working space; or make the document appear in the size it will be when printed.

-->Use the Hand tool as a spacebar lock: When the Hand tool is active, you can hold down the Alt key (Option key on the Mac) and click in the image to zoom out, or hold down the Ctrl key (Ô key on the Mac) and click to zoom in — without needing to hold down the spacebar as you would with the normal keyboard shortcut.

The Hand-tool-as-a-spacebar-lock trick is new in Photoshop CS. Another new option, Scroll All Windows, enables you to move around all open documents simultaneously.

Double-clicking the Hand tool resizes the document image so its longest dimension expands to fill the screen in that direction. A tall, portrait-oriented image balloons up until the document is as tall as possible in the Photoshop working area. A wide, landscape-oriented image expands its width to fit within the left and right borders of the screen.

-->Press the Page Up or Page Down buttons to change the view. These buttons move the view up or down by a window.

Now that you have become friendly with the Zoom and Hand tools, here is one last tip. If you hold down the Shift key while scrolling with the Hand tool or zooming with the Zoom tool, all open image windows will scroll or zoom together. This can come in especially handy, for example, when you have created another view of the same document (Window➪Arrange➪New Window).