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Designing on Retina Display


GPaul

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Hello folks!


I just changed my laptop and I bought a Macbook with Retina display. Everything is fine, except the Design related issues.
As you know, Retina has a huge display compared to 15'' laptops. All my designs made on my laptop (if you take a look from a normal display, you see them full HD) are low quality if you take a look from Retina.


Regarding my problem, I've got few questions.


1) How should I work in order to have the same view for my designs, on Retina and normal display?
2) What resolution should I use now? (if I send a design to someone who does not own a Retina display, the layout will be quite bigger than normal / If someone sends me a layout designed on a normal display, I have to zoom out to be...almost hd on retina display) I used to work on 1349px width on my laptop.


Thanks a lot.
I'm looking forward hearing from you.

All the best,
Paul
 

MrToM

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In short, because this can get very complex very quickly:

...1) How should I work in order to have the same view for my designs, on Retina and normal display?...

Exactly as you have been.


...2) What resolution should I use now?...
The same as you have been.


...if I send a design to someone who does not own a Retina display, the layout will be quite bigger than normal...
No, it wont.


Pixel based images do not change, they will be the same regardless on what digital medium they are viewed on.

That really is a very simplified answer but in essence you do not need to change anything.

Regards.
MrToM.
 

Tom Mann

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To elaborate a bit on what MrToM said, it might be good to respond to your comment that images that used to look good to you on your laptop now look like they have lower quality.

The reason for this is that because the pixel pitch on the retina display is finer than on your laptop, if you want the size of the object on screen (ie, in inches or cm) to be the same on both of these displays, you need to make the magnification in Photoshop for the Retina display to be higher than the magnification in PS you were using for your laptop display, and there simply aren't enough pixels in the images that you used to create to support this higher magnification.

As MrToM effectively said, absolutely nothing in the file changes when you change displays, so if you were happy with the results of editing using your laptop (eg, images destined for the web had the right pixel dimensions, images to be printed didn't look pixelated, etc.), don't change anything except to just put your nose closer to the retina display and be careful not to set the magnification in PS (on the Retina system) to be over 100%, and you'll be just fine.

HTH,

Tom M
 

GPaul

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don't change anything except to just put your nose closer to the retina display

Well, if I'm working on the same resolution on retina, everything is soooo small. All the elements are so small, on 100% zoom, you almost see them :D
 

Tom Mann

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Yup ... I understand.

So, another, essentially equivalent way to express what I said in the 2nd paragraph of my previous post is that previously, you were building images with pixel dimensions that were adequate for a low resolution display, but not adequate for your new high rez output device.

Well, pro photographers face this issue all the time. For example, the initial use for an image might be on a web page with an allotted space of 640x480 pixels, but then they redesign the page and now need the pixel dimensions of the image to be 1280x960, and then a few months after that, someone comes along and wants to buy a fairly large print of this image, so now the photographer needs the pixel dimensions to be several thousand pixels in both directions.

If the first thing they did after taking the picture was to down rez it to 640x480 (say, to "save space"), and then they performed all their extensive photoshop work at that scale, to be blunt, they would be "up the creek" because they wouldn't be able to use any of the work they had already invested in this image and would have to repeat it at the larger sizes being requested. So, the solution that pro photographers use is to always do their photoshop editing and other work at the highest resolution available from their camera, and then once done, just down-rez to whatever size is needed for any particular use of this image. It turns out that this way of working is so common that Adobe designed the workflow in Lightroom to do exactly this.

Your situation, as well as that of a lot of people who have moved up to larger, higher rez displays is a lot like that of the hypotherical photographer I described in the previous paragraph. In fact, the solution to "future-proofing" your efforts is exactly the same: Always work at higher pixel dimensions that you ever think you may need, and then, as the years go by and displays continue to improve, and other uses of your images arise, you'll be sitting pretty. It won't matter if someone wants to make a 50x50 pixel icon / button out of your image, another person wants to make a mural sized print, or you move to the jazzy-snazzy hyper-Retina display Apple will introduce in 2025 -- you'll be ready.

Of course, the down side to this approach is that images with large pixel dimensions will process more slowly in PS, will require more storage space, etc. etc., so most people take a middle ground, and work on images with reasonably large pixel dimensions, not crazy large images.

Thoughts?

Tom M
 

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