After spending 6 hours with Lightroom’s new HiDPI Retina Display Support, let’s me just say it’s incredible. A giant step forward. It’s like seeing all of your images in a whole new light. Looking at images on a ~300ppi screen with the same clarity and resolution of a fine print is a long time dream of mine that I know would someday come true.
We’ve been living in the dark ages with our ~72ppi displays. We’ve been seeing not the true nature but a facsimile of our images. Things like sharpness, noise and grain just don’t look right on a low res screens like they do in print. With HiDPI displays we can actually visualize these things and make better informed decisions while we’re developing our images. I think this will improve our relationship with images in our modern, digital workflows tremendously.
So what brought this on today? Adobe released a release candidate of Lightroom 4.3 at Adobe Labs this afternoon. It’s the first version of their applications that has support for HiDPI displays like those found in Apple’s Retina MacBookPros. Expect to see HiDPI support in future versions of Photoshop, InDesign, etc next year. Before we know it, we’ll have 30″ HiDPI desktop displays to enjoy this to an even greater extent.
Try it out if you can. I’ll think you’ll have an “Ah ha” moment and perhaps a “Oh shit, this is the way everything is going to be in the future” moment as well.