Retina & CS6 Photoshop
Out of context: Reply #29
- Started
- Last post
- 32 Responses
- ESKEMA0
This topic clearly gets on my nerves, so I'm going to expand a little on the subject.
Pixels are not a definitive unit like centimeters or inches, they are a physical point in a raster image, or the smallest addressable element in a display device. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pix… )
This means that unlike centimeters or inches, they vary in size, depending on the device they're displayed, and an image with 100px width will always be 100px wide no matter the PPI of the screen, be it 1 or 3568899. (open up an image in PS, go to image size, uncheck resample image and then change the resolution, nothing happens, wow, wtf?, big surprise, that's because pixels are resolution independent, you could be saving all your images for the web at 1 resolution or 500, as long as the pixels width is 100, it will stay the same size.)
A "Retina Display" is commonly known as a display that has a very high concentration of pixels per inch square (PPI), but that is just media talk. The Retina goodness comes from software technology that takes advantage of high PPI screens and make them act as if they had 1/4 the pixels, in doing so, it makes 4 pixels act as 1. So you have ultra sharp 1 retina-pixels with a 4 times more detail than a non-retina pixel. But that is the technology working, not the display. You can have the same effect using a 20 PPI screen if you want, it's not exclusive to high PPI screens.
Now, the whole software as to be made to work in this environment, otherwise, if you use a 1 to 1 ratio, stuff will be really tiny which is not the point. The point is for the stuff to have the same size but with more detail, thus, for this to work, you need to have all the rendered elements created specifically for it in order to take advantage of the Super Uber Bacon Magic Crispiness.
Here's the problem, the internet was not built for retina technology, so everything still works as the old days. So what did Apple do? They had to upscale images in the browser (and probably on other places) in order for you to see them as you would expect, otherwise, it would break the internet on your precious new MBP. As for everything else that is scalable (text, vector elements,etc..) the upscale is not degrading them, so they always look great.
And what about Adobe? What can they do? They have to display images at no upscale (100% or 1 to 1 ratio) because otherwise you could not take advantage of it's software to optimize images for retina devices, but that make them look tiny, because they are being displayed pixel by pixel, An image created specifically for retina has 4x the size of the area it will occupy.
I don't have a retina display, so the problem may arise at this point where I cannot verify the accuracy of the 200% in Photoshop and the upscale Apple uses in its software. I asked for people to upload images of that but no one did.
If the 200% of PS gives you something different than the upscale that Apple does in Browser, then there's a problem indeed. If your "problem" is just because PS 100% view of the images is smaller than the browser, than you have no problem at all, you're just ignorant.