Photoshop CS5.5 UI too small

Forum|Forum|8 years ago
January 6, 2018
4 replies
23435 views

Hi everyone. I realize this topic has been posted before and I still haven't found a solution.

I finally got a new Laptop (last one was from 2010...) and I had downloaded and installed Adobe Design Standard Suite, used it for years. After getting the new Laptop I reinstalled my CS5.5 products BUT when I open Photoshop the UI is incredibly small. My UI Interface Options only give me "Small, Medium, Large" and it's already on Large. Changing my screen resolution does not change anything either. Illustrator and InDesign are fine, it's just Photoshop.

Is there a solution to this yet? My research has yielded me no luck.

Thanks in advance!

Correct answer D Fosse

@Dustin337678154z9p

It's not a fix at all, it's sweeping it under the carpet. If that's good enough, then by all means.

What this does is turn your 4K display into an ordinary HD display. Instead of 3840 x 2160 screen pixels, you now have 1920 x 1080 screen pixels. One image pixel is now displayed on screen using four screen pixels.

So that's a lot of wasted money.

High resolution screen support in Photoshop was introduced in the CC 2014 version. CS5 is way before that.

The thing with Photoshop is that it needs to scale up the UI but not the image. The image needs to use the full screen resolution, obviously, otherwise it's all wasted. That was not possible until CC 2014.

D

Dustin337678154z9p

Participant

I know that this is an old post but the solution to this is actually pretty simple on Windows. If you open the folder containing the shortcut you use to launch Photoshop ->right-click -> Properties -> Compatability -> Change High DPI Settings -> Override High DPI scaling behavior. Scaling performed by -> System... This issue goes away!

D Fosse

Correct answer

Community Expert

@Dustin337678154z9p

It's not a fix at all, it's sweeping it under the carpet. If that's good enough, then by all means.

What this does is turn your 4K display into an ordinary HD display. Instead of 3840 x 2160 screen pixels, you now have 1920 x 1080 screen pixels. One image pixel is now displayed on screen using four screen pixels.

So that's a lot of wasted money.

High resolution screen support in Photoshop was introduced in the CC 2014 version. CS5 is way before that.

The thing with Photoshop is that it needs to scale up the UI but not the image. The image needs to use the full screen resolution, obviously, otherwise it's all wasted. That was not possible until CC 2014.

D Fosse

Community Expert

Note that this works by essentially turning your high resolution screen into a standard low resolution one. Everything is scaled up. The high screen resolution is wasted.

To take advantage of the higher screen resolution, Photoshop still needs to display the image at 100%, one image pixel mapped to one screen pixel - any scaling can only apply to the interface, not the image. This is what makes Photoshop a special case, and this is why 4K/retina support took a while to implement and requires OS support to work.

Vector data including text works differently. This is always rendered at native screen resolution regardless of scaling. In that case scaling everything is the right way to do it. That's technically a lot easier to accomplish, and so apps like Ai and Id could get 4K support early on.

Web browsers took the brute approach. They don't attempt to display the image at full resolution. They just scale it up so that one image pixel is represented by four screen pixels. Which is what the Antonielli hack does too.

J

JRMCGRAW

Participant

Please note Dan's updated fix for this issue as noted (Please try the new solution by following this link: Windows High DPI Fix) at the head of the page corresponding to the link above (https://www.danantonielli.com/adobe-app-scaling-on-high-dpi-displays-fix/). This link (https://danantonielli.com/app-scaling-on-high-dpi-displays-fix-2019/) will take you to his tutorial "App Scaling on High DPI Displays (FIX 2019). It doesn't involve registry edits 😉 and it worked for me with Windows 10 Professional and Photoshop CS5 using a Retina Display 🙂