HOW TO UNLOCK UI SCALE IN MACBOOK PHOTOSHOP 2025

[akash_7107]

I have installed Adobe Photoshop on my MacBook m2, All the tool icons and interfaces show up too small, creating trouble for me. and the UI scaling is locked. How do I fix it?

[Sameer K]

Hey, @akash_7107. Welcome to the Photoshop Community. I've moved your post to discussions for now. I'll clarify this for you. 

This feature is grayed out in Preferences because UI scaling is not supported on Mac OS.The display scaling option is locked to System Settings > Display. The font size in Preferences > Interface is functional, but adjustments are slight.

If the interface is hard to see, consider altering your Mac's display resolution. Additionally, 3rd party menu bar extensions can help you easily switch display settings and save preferences. 

Thanks!
Sameer K

(Type '@' and type my name to mention me when you reply)

[Justyna&Max]

HI, i have same problem Here.
Photoshop misrepresents the size of the object on the screen. I don't know what resolution to set to get it right. It's even worse with InDesign. Photoshop shows the size of the images half the size, while InDesign shows 4 times the actual size, of course at 100% scale

[ExUSA]

Photoshop always shows ACTUAL pixels at 100%. Mac Retina screens are scaled (four real pixels = one screen pixel at the system default) so you may need to view at 200% to get correct size on screen. This is also true with 4k displays which are scaled the same way.

InDesign uses inches/mm or points/picas which are mapped to the screen based on document resolution. make sure you have document settings that work for your needs.

https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign-discussions/indesign-sizing-resolution-question/m-p/13935858

https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/kb/fix-image-display-performance.html

[Conrad_C]

Also…you should know that if your goal is to represent real world object sizes, 100% is usually the least useful command. Because of that, Photoshop has multiple commands for representing object size:

The command View > 100% usually does not represent any real world object size (except on-screen viewing on old 1x displays). Because 100% means one image pixel to one display pixel, the real world size depends on the ppi resolution of the display, and those vary widely, anywhere from 90 ppi to over 500 ppi on some phones.

The command View > Actual Size can represent the real world object size in print, by getting the ppi resolution value of your display and correcting the rulers for that. By the way, this is the method InDesign uses, because InDesign is very print-oriented so it adjust 100% based on the display ppi vs the output ppi. So if you want Photoshop and InDesign to match, use View > Actual Size in both applications. And if you want an image to place at the expected size in inches on a page in InDesign, its native resolution should be 300 ppi, or you can scale it in InDesign until its effective resolution is 300 ppi.

The command View > Print Size can represent the real world object size if you entered a correct Print Resolution and Screen Resolution in Photoshop Preferences / Units and Rulers. You can even simulate the real world object size for any display by entering that into the Print Resolution field, because Print Resolution really means output resolution.

[Trevor.Dennis]

A useful thread worth bookmarking.  Thanks for the info.

[Conrad_C]

Photoshop is not misrepresenting the size of objects. 100% means one image pixel to one screen pixels. On Retina (Mac) and HiDPI (Windows/Android) screens, the pixels are about half the size, so 100% naturally also appears about half the size.

What you are probably running into is that web browsers default to displaying images at 2x. That is the real issue. This only happens if a website is not specifically coded to present Retina/HiDPI images, because then the web browser must assume an image was edited for 1x and therefore enlarge it by 2x so that the image does not appear too small on web pages displayed on Retina/HiDPI displays.

How to prove this for yourself: Try any other image editor, including photo apps that are not made by Adobe, and photo apps that compete directly with Photoshop. You are probably going to find that they all display 100% the same way, the same way Photoshop is working. Because none of those applications is wrong about the size, including Photoshop.

So although web browsers and image editors show 100% differently on Retina/HiDPI displays, they are actually each doing the right thing based on their contexts. What is left is for all of us to understand that properly, so that we solve for the actual problem (web browsers enlarge images by 2x). In Photoshop, a quick fix is to edit at 200%. I added a keyboard shortcut to Photoshop for View > 200% for this reason.