3 month can be long.

May be we can get a new beta version in 3-4 weeks.

JO

Does anybody have already one of the new MacBook Pros with Retina Display and can share a screen shot and video, how LR looks like on the display?

Thanks

JO

I took delivery of my RMBP last week on Thursday and ingested my first shoot Saturday. I can report that LR previews are significantly compromised at the moment (sorry no time to produce screenshots, others will shortly I'm sure), so much so that critical image selection is almost impossible. For comparison I purchased and installed the latest version of Aperture and the difference is enormous. Aperture shows the full potential of the new display. I can't fault Adobe for this issue, Apple's pre-launch secrecy would seem to be the culprit. I only hope Adobe produces updates for LR and Photoshop quickly to give image previews parity with Aperture. As someone who has deliberately stuck with LR3.6  pending other performance improvements in LR4, I'd say the chances of the "fix" being back ported to LR3.6 are probably slim to none. Pity.

Commentary. This is so typical for technology today, one step forward, at least one step backward. I needed to replace a four-year-old MBP and with a four-week assignment in France upcoming I pulled the trigger on the RMBP. Pluses. Thinner and lighter - any reduction is good for air travel, 16GB RAM (the old machine had 6GB), SSD drive, immediate USB 3 throughput improvement while portable Thunderbolt solutions (card readers and non-raid drive solutions) still mature AND an awesome screen. Unfortunately all negated, or at least temporarily hamstrung by the preview rendering issue. Bottom line I have a couple of days to get comfortable with Aperture for editing on the road. Hopefully by the time I'm back in August and the real editing begins there will be a patch. Then, like it or not I'll have to deal with the worklfow throughput challenges of LR4 and 25,000 images.

We really are all guinea pigs these days, nothing is fully baked anymore. We pay our money and then start our second jobs as beta testers and QA engineers.

Flashbulb65,

I experimented with those alternative resolutions, the one that shows the most screen real estate helps a little but doesn't come close to fixing the problem... unfortunately. Lloyd Chambers at macperformanceguide.com now has his RMBP and should stay on top of the issue.

If you are looking for a temporary way to see the embedded JPEG previews in a NEF file (for example) all you need to do is select the files of interest in the Finder and press the space bar.  These are good enough to do the culling.

I tried the high 2880x1800 resolution with the script.

The menues and adjustement tools are just too small. :-(

Adobe needs to update Lightroom and provide us at least a beta version for testing with the Retina MBP.

Please vote it on Photoshop.com ! Thanks

http://t.co/Mj0UFLkm

JO

What is it about the new Retina display that doesn’t allow you to use LR?

It's funny, some commenters have made it seem like LR is currently unusable because of how bad photos look in certain views. I'm definitely going for the Retina display and will wait for LR to get updated.

Greg

Lightroom hasn't had interface elements upgraded yet but it runs and according to Matt K, it works and looks fine.

Ergo, there is nothing to prevent it's running. Or was your question rhetorical?

Well an application that has been upgraded to Retina elements will look better than one that hasn't.  I think at this time in Lightroom the picture would be "pixel doubled" in Lightroom whereas in Aperture (or iPhoto) you're seeing true 1:1 so the image will be sharper.

Matt may say Lightroom looks "awesome" on the new Retina MacBook Pro, but certainly Aperture will look "awesomer" on screen with the same photo.  It will be easier to make critical sharpness decisions with Aperture than Lightroom at this time.

CatOne2 wrote:

 

Well an application that has been upgraded to Retina elements will look better than one that hasn't.  I think at this time in Lightroom the picture would be "pixel doubled" in Lightroom whereas in Aperture (or iPhoto) you're seeing true 1:1 so the image will be sharper.

 

Matt may say Lightroom looks "awesome" on the new Retina MacBook Pro, but certainly Aperture will look "awesomer" on screen with the same photo.  It will be easier to make critical sharpness decisions with Aperture than Lightroom at this time.

Unfortunately the information you can find online on the usability of the rMBP for Lightroom work is confusing. I remember reading an article (unfortunately can't find it now) where a someone bought the rMBP as it came out and tried to use it for professional photography work. He said that the images looked fuzzy in Lightroom to the point of not being able to use it for properly judging image sharpness. He didn't say the images looked "awesome" in LR, or even "OK". He was clear that when zoomed 100% the quality was bad enough to make it unusable for judging whether the image was sharp or not.

Then you see some other posts that say that it's just the interface text that looks a bit bad/really small when you enable full retina resolution, but that the images themselves look fine. I'm sure it will all be eventually addressed in a LR update. But right now it's hard to know if LR, as it stands at this point, can really be used on the rMBP for critical photography work.

Hey Chris, thanks for posting that.

I have pretty good eyesight, but even if I could not read the text in the LR interface I think I could find my way around as I've been using it for long enough to know what's where, and as you say I do quite a bit with keyboard shortcuts. Hearing from people that use LR and some form of tweak (like setRes) to force it to 2880x1800 and can report a good experience is really useful. It sounds like it would be a good compromise for me until LR gets a retina update. All I need to know is that I can trust the images I see in LR at retina resolution, and your answer to that seems to be "yes", which makes me happy .

Andrew Rodney wrote:

 

goodeyecss wrote:

 

 

If you tweak OS X to run at its native 2880x1800 resolution, which means no artificial scaling and all interface elements become tiny, THEN Lightroom and the photos look awesome. It's the only workaround right now until adobe updates the software. I've been using this mode for all my weddings, family shoots and commercial work for the past month and it's great. The interface might be too small for some people but any die hard LR people that use the keyboard more than the mouse will probably like it.

OK, that paragraph provided more information about the issues than anything I’ve read so far. Thanks.

 

Any comments about Photoshop?

From what I have read the 2880x1900 screen appears to be 1440x900 to an unmodified application.  When something is drawn to the screen the system uses 4 pixels for every 1 in the source.  In order to make the best use of the high resolution display the application must be modified to display images at native resolution while causing (I don't know how) text elements, etc, to be drawn larger.  If I set my MacBook Pro "retina" to 2880x1800, then, as others have said, the Lightroom screen elements a very small.

I have also read the Adobe demonstrated a version of Photoshop running at native resolution on the 2880x900 screen.  Alas, I cannot find the source

Thanks, Butch!

The same issues affect the adobe creative suite (photoshop, etc) - we know CS6 will get the retina update but I personally doubt they'll update 5.5 or earlier, especially since they totally revamped the cs6 interface anyways.  

Looking at un-optimized apps on the rMBP is like going to your parents' house in the late '90s and seeing they'd changed the resolution on their LCD to something non-native to make the icons bigger - in essence the net result is the same on the rMBP, everything gets a little fuzzy and generally looks like crap. 

Make no mistake, this is the future and us early adopters will have to "suffer" a little until the software industry catches up - but there's no doubt in my mind that it will, and I'm personally really excited about the new interface possibilities as are hinted at with apple's aperture, final cut pro, etc.  

--

Chris Schmauch (iPhone)

Owner / Photographer / Creative Director

GoodEye Photography + Design

www.GoodEyePhotography.com

(831) 216-6210

We're a Family-Run Business!

VeloDramatic wrote:

 

I can't fault Adobe for this issue, Apple's pre-launch secrecy would seem to be the culprit.

HiDPI has been around within XCode since JULI 2011:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7/14/

So if Adobe had really wanted, they could have easily given us proper Retina support since their launches of CS6 and LR4, just in time with the introduction of the rMBP.

That said, I've hardly got any complaints with LR and Photoshop running under 2880x1800 trick mode. I don't even see any issues of a limitation to 2048px in preview. Just render full size previews, done. Editing images at that resolution is nothing short a revelation for me. You can see detail, texture _and_ the image as a whole at the same time, without a coarse display grid interfering. Judging image sharpness and finding blemishes - in the context of the whole - is just that much easier now.

Ideal for me would be the interface scaled as if it was a 1920x1200 screen resolution, which would give both more screen real estate  and massively improved fidelity compared to the original 1440x900, with perfectly acceptable usability at the same time. Yes I know there is the "more space" option in the display settings, but that only leads to massive performance problems and artifacts since LR then just runs at 1920x1200, Quartz does the rest at a whopping 3840x2400 and than everything is scaled back to 2880x1800.

I know this was posted awhile ago. I just received my RMBP yesterday and loaded it with the latest releases of LR4 and PS6. PS6 interface is way worse then Lightroom. It appears to me that Adobe pushed out an update to LR4 for retina, cause the interface in LR4 is 10 times better then PS6. HOWEVER, when comparing in Mountain Lion Preview, at the same size, the image is 10 times better in Apple Preview then any Adobe product. Which makes it difficult as a photographer to see actual. Don't count being to precise in CS6 cause the pixels are off. While many lament the RMBP technology purchase, they have to consider that they bought next gen and have to have patience for software to evolve, that's just common sense. It doesn't happen over night. Enjoy your new RMBP and manage along the way with software. At least your not using PC! lol!