^ In many cases, I have found it much easier and faster to ditch the paste stencil and to solder with an iron.
1. Flux the pads for any number of components you want to do. You don't have to do the whole board at once. On a larger board, you can work on just a couple square inches at a time, to avoid smudging. If doing a lot of boards, you can even do just one or two component values at a time, for ease of parts manangement/identification. If doing a lot of board, you can batch this process and do as many boards at a time as you want, as long as you place the parts before the flux dries out.
2. With the naked eye, use your pickup tool to roughly place the components. No magnification necessary. Just get them in the vicinity of the pads, at least. Repeat for as many boards as you fluxed.
3. Use a tip that holds a good blob of solder; I prefer a large CF tip. Preload the tip with solder.
4. Under magnification, hold/align the part with tweezers. As soon as the part is lined up, touch the fluxed pad or multiple pads with the iron to "paint" on the solder.
5. Use the part you just soldered as a handle. Holding it with the tweezers, you can precisely move the board to center the next part in the FOV. You maintain a really good connection/continuity between your hands, tweezers, iron, eyes, and board, this way, and this step flies by just like the previous two.
The "placing" in this case isn't a precision operation. The alignment/soldering happen concurrently, and you can use as much magnification as you want without any issue of FOV or looking away to pick up the next part. All your parts of immediate interest are already on the board. This is extremely important to maintain your context. Once you enter the "world of small," you want to maintain that as long as you can. Switching back and forth to the scope takes a little time and mental stress. The only problem is you have to pick up some more solder occasionally. With a large CF tip, you can solder perhaps over a dozen passives before reloading.
I save IC's for last. In a large batch process, using a CF tip, I usually don't even need to stop for more solder on most chips. I can generally pick up enough for drag soldering from the decoupling caps.