This episode, Natalie from the Vector GFX team shows you the Annotation Lens — a tool built to easily capture and call out detail on a specific area of your canvas.
What You’ll Learn
A lens object lets you magnify or highlight a particular region of your illustration without redrawing anything perfect for zooming in on a detail your audience needs to see clearly, whether that’s a mechanical joint, a dense label cluster, or any area where precision matters. canvasxdraw gives you full control over how that magnified view looks and behaves.
Watch: Using the Annotation Lens
Quick Recap: Placing an Annotation Lens
1. Select the Annotation Lens tool.
2. Click the center of the area you want to zoom into, and place the lens.
3. Set your properties. With the tool selected, you’ll see options for lens shape, lens size, lens frame color, and magnification and adjust any of these to fit what you’re highlighting.
Absolute vs. Relative
Once your lens is placed, selecting it gives you further editing control including two toggles worth knowing:
Absolute: lets you move the lens in any direction without affecting what it’s viewing.
Relative: moves the annotation along with the lens, so the magnified view travels with it as you reposition.
Mix and match lens shapes, sizes, magnification levels, and frame colors to fit the illustration a single document can use several lenses styled differently depending on what each one needs to communicate.
Why It’s Worth Knowing
Not every detail needs its own separate illustration. The Annotation Lens lets you keep the full context of your drawing visible while still giving viewers a clear, magnified look at the part that matters most a faster and cleaner way to communicate detail than cropping, duplicating, or building a second callout graphic by hand.
Haven’t tried canvasxdraw yet? See what precision without compromise feels like.
This post is part of our canvasxdraw How-To video series. Have a feature you want us to cover next? Let us know.