I’ll assume you’ve used a few versions of Photoshop and noticed the changes Adobe made in CS4, and now in CS5. To be clear, in CS4, Adobe added a “feature” that displays a pixel grid once you have zoomed to a certain level. In CS5, Adobe changed the default behavior of the zoom tool such that when you click and drag the zoom tool, the zooming happens as in an animation.

I hate both of these features. I don’t like the visual “noise” interjected by the pixel grid, so let’s first figure out how to get rid of that. Shopping through the preferences panel (Cmd+K on a Mac) reveals … um, nothing. So, a bit more Googling and messing around and presto! Go to View > Show > Pixel Grid and make sure it is unchecked. The first step in figuring this out was to identify the actual Adobe-approved name for the feature (Pixel Grid), then figure out how to turn it off.

Now, the second, and more frustrating, of these features is the zooming one. Figuring out what this feature is called took a bit more persistence. Pro-Tip: It’s called “Scrubby Zooming.” To turn it off and make it so you can again draw a marquee with the zoom tool to do your zooming, first select the zoom tool in the tool well. Then, with the zoom tool selected, look in the tool bar at the top, and uncheck “scrubby zooming.”

And now you’re back!