Photos seem blurry until I zoom in on photoshop

[marcoh21281877]

Hi All,

Photos seem unncessarily blurry until I zoom in and out of photoshop cc. It's driving me crazy (especially, when I have many photos to go through!).

What is the cause of this issue?! What can I do about this (settings, etc), it is making me scrap photos that I should not be scrapping (especially, when I use a manual focus lense at times).

Sample photo at different zoom levels...

26%

33%

50%

[davescm · Accepted solution]

Hi

The only way to judge sharpness is at 100% zoom where 1 image pixel is mapped to 1 screen pixel and avoids any interpolation

When you zoom out, another issue also comes to play. At zoom levels less than 66.7% any blending between layers uses 8 bit previews rather than the full image data.

So a zoomed out view can be used for composition etc, but for checking sharpness or blending always use 100%

Dave

[marcoh21281877]

Dave, that seems rather counter intuitive! That would add another process to another already (lengthy) editing process.

When flicking through photos, you want to know quickly if they are sharp at 25% or 30%, not at 100%.

Is there anyway to bypass that at all?

[jane-e]

Hi marcoh21281877,

This is from Adobe Help:

View images in Photoshop

[davescm]

No you can't bypass it.

Think about it - at 25% Photoshop has to display 4x4 = 16 image pixels using just 1 screen pixel so has to take an average which introduces some blur

The 16 bit to 8 bit change at less than 66.7% is historic and was done to improve screen redraws.

Dave

[marcoh21281877]

Okay, but why is this the case then?

Disabling GPU scaling reduces Photoshop's functionality,  but it somehow enables focus to always seem sharp (given that the photo was already 100% sharp).

NO GPU Scaling

GPU Scaling

[davescm]

Hi

Can you try checking "Use Legacy Compositing" and see if you then see a difference. CC2019 (v20) brought in some new compositing algorithms

Also - do you see a difference at 100% zoom?

Dave

[marcoh21281877]

I do not have that option, I am currently running an older version of Photoshop CC.

[melissapiccone]

It's been like this for forever...

[O28078650us1a]

I have the same issue. Its bothering me because it never use to do that!