Start-up screens text too small to see on new 4K screen

[williamr76319829]

I have 2012 versions of CS6 & Lightroom. I purchased a new computer with a 4K screen (3840x2160) after downloading the start-up screen text is too small too see. Need a magifying glass.  Is there a patch or setting or something I can do to view both programs at normal sizes.  They can't be used as is.

Thanks,

[ManiacJoe]

You do need to update both software to get versions that know how to deal with the hi-res monitors.

Unfortunately, since I don't have a 4k monitor, I don't recall what the lowest versions are that support them.

[99jon]

Go to your system display settings and try reducing the display dimensions below the native resolution.

[DetonatorX]

This is not a correct answer.  It is a wrong answer.  I paid for those pixels.

Lightroom isn't the only app I use,  changing this setting affects all the other applications I use,  most of which work fine with a high resolution monitor in 2022.

I am seeing problems even when I am in dual monitor mode and put lightroom windows on my secondary monitor.  See the attached screenshot of the settings dialog where there is not enough space allocated to fit the text so that the labels can't be read.  I expect open source morons who are coding in their spare time on Linux to argue about why this OK.  A commercial software vendor that is making applications for Windows has to get this right.

[Conrad C]

For a 4K or higher display, it’s true that simply changing the resolution is not enough. The actual correct answer is that a 4K display should be set to native resolution and 200% scaling in the Displays settings. That shows things at the correct size (not too tiny) and at 2x HiDPI pixel density, or twice as detailed as on an older display (using all of the pixels to increase detail, not shrink the size). 

But that’s just one half of it, the system half. The other half is about the applications. The question here is whether the 2012 versions of Lightroom and Photoshop are properly adapted for HiDPI. I can’t remember but chances are they probably are not, because 2012 was when Apple first started shipping HiDPI displays (Windows came later). So if you properly set the display settings in Windows and the applications are displaying a UI that’s too tiny, the problem may be that the software versions being run are, at this point, a decade old, so those versions probably don’t even know what HiDPI is. The last few versions of both applications are properly adapted for HiDPI displays.

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@DetonatorX wrote:

A commercial software vendor that is making applications for Windows has to get this right.

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In other words, they did “get this right” several years ago, but the software versions being run on that computer are far older than that. The answer is to use newer versions.

[Walt Thirion Photography]

What you are seeing is an artifact from how Windows scales the size of text, etc. on hi-res monitors. It took Adobe some time to correctly change the UI to work correctly with hi-res monitors and Microsoft's scaling implementation. If I remember correctly, there was a lot of finger pointing between Microsoft and Adobe on why it took so long but it seems like Adobe rolled out a version in around 2017 that worked correctly. To my knowledge, the UI update is only available with newer versions of LR.