I find zooming in PM much easier than in Photoshop. Just Command-click where you want to go and it zooms straight there at your default zoom level, 100% in my case. To view a specific area at 100% in PS, I have to go to 100% and then pan around the image trying to find the bit I need to see. PM also has the same Spacebar-and-drag behaviour as Photoshop while zoomed. 
Exactly. The Z or Command-click is ideal for checking if the photo is in focus very quickly, especially as one can then just flip trough the photos using the scroll wheel, still at 100%, tagging or rating the keepers and trash. That feature alone is invaluable for a fast photographic workflow, the best of any photo viewer
.
As for the
loupe, I think it would be good for fast workflow like this:
A
detachable pane (just like Nav or Favs) working as either:
1) small preview where clicking on it would bring the
clicked portion into 100% (or 50%, whatever, selectable) - allowing one to easily check focus without going to Preview mode
or 2) alt/shift/whatever clicking on the
specific part of a _thumbnail_ in thumbnail tab would bring the
clicked portion into 100% view in the loupe pane
or 3) some combination of the two.
This is the way it was implemented in Digital Photo Professional (maybe Aperture too?), I do not know if it's pantented/patentable/whatever. But it beats the crap out of the "loupe" in Lightroom, which just loads the photo big in the preview window. Especially combined if there are Jpeg codecs allowing region decoding (does such thing exist
or was it only for Jpeg2000 I think
), this could be fast enough computing-power-wise. It would be great like this.
Second, a great thing would be (AFAIK already mentioned in the feature requests earlier)
automatic zooming to region of focus point, for cameras who write the focus point to Exif makernotes. This is a bit tricky implementing, because the makernotes are undocumented by camera makers. But I think Robgalbraith.com has at least Photoshop Javascript to read active focus point from Canon files - which they used in the recent review of 1DmIII focus problems. I guess this would have to do matching on camera type to get the proper AF point mask to work on different models though.
This would allow even easier getting trough huge amount of shots, and could even work in conjunction with the loupe/preview pane, where metakey-clicking on thumbnail could automagically get the view around the clicked photo's focus point in the loupe.
Third, please, if you get to implementing a loupe in the future, consider
making it a detachable pane, just like the Favs and Nav are - I am not a big fan of undockable floating windows (obscuring the rest of user interface), and that way users can it both ways - floating window OR pane.
Thanks, Frantisek
