Resolution change between 2019 and 2020 version?

[patrikm19940770]

Hi,

I'm not sure what's going on here: I've been working in Photoshop 2019 on an image that is 1920px wide. My screen resolution is 2048px wide (IMac Retina screen). So the design's been pretty much full width on my screen.

Today I happened to open the .psd in Photoshop 2020 (first run) and suddenly the image seems to have shrunk. It looks like it's about 50% smaller.  It still says 1920px wide when I check the width. But the image takes up a smaller area of my screen. Screen resolution is still 2048px and hasn't changed somehow. 

Any ideas what might be going on here? 

Cheers

Johan

[patrikm19940770]

Hi,

I can actually answer this myself after finding a "hack": select the Photoshop app icon, then press command and "i" (info?) on keyboard and select "Open in Low Resolution" in window and the psd or whatever reverts back to the old size. Prolly Photoshop was in this mode but switched to the default setting when I changed to 2020.

If you have any aother remedies I'd love to hear them.

[Rob de Winter]

Hey Johan, I'm just wondering: wasn't this always the case? 

When opening a file in Photoshop 100% on a Retina screen, all image pixels will exactly fit to screen pixels. So, an image will always look smaller on a high res screen like Retina screens (most of the time around 50%) than it'll actually will show up on a website or when you open it up in Preview. I think it's not a Photoshop 2020 issue 😉 

[D Fosse]

(moved to proper position in the thread)

[davescm]

At 100% zoom Photoshop maps 1 image pixel onto 1 screen pixel. An iMac retina screen, depending on the model, is between 2304 and 5120 pixels wide - although some apps may report it at half the real pixel width. So, for example, an iMac with Retina 4K display is 4096 x 2304 pixels, but some apps may report it as 2048 x 1152 as they are using scaling to fit smaller pixel size images to the larger screen.

By default Photoshop does not do that scaling. That is because we need to critically judge the image quality with no scaling applied.  Forcing scaling by using workarounds will make the image physically bigger on the screen but you lose the benefits of the hi-res retina screen.

Dave

[D Fosse]

That's right. Your retina screen is 4096 pixels wide. Most consumer-oriented viewers (including all the native MacOS apps) will treat that as 2048 pixels to keep the on-screen size. Photoshop displays it correctly, and thus pretty small on that high-resolution screen.

The "open in low resolution" setting does one thing: it turns your high-resolution retina screen, which you supposedly paid a lot of money for, into a perfectly ordinary and standard screen. You could have saved the money.

[patrikm19940770]

Hi,

you are of course all right - it's that pesky retina resolution behind it all. I should have saved 50% of my money by buying an old school Mac as D_Fosse says! Then I could've afforded both HBO AND Netflix.

I guess I could design double size to see the design in the size non-retinaers see. How do you do it?

Anyways, thanks all for your time and your answers!

Cheers

Johan

[D Fosse]

Just view at 200% if you want to see it as those other applications display it. That's exactly what they do, same thing.