Zooming at anything besides 100% not anti-aliasing properly?

[SashaRJones]

Photoshop wizards, I need your help! I'm trying to transition from Photoshop CS6 to CC2017 and encountering a make-or-break issue. I fought with this for a few hours yesterday and I'm stumped as to what to try next.

When I zoom to anything besides an 'even' percentage like 50% or 100%, Photoshop does an awful job at anti-aliasing the image working space preview and spits out some jaggedy-edged hot garbage. I've tried configuring the Performance settings every which way to no avail, and have updated every driver I thought could be relevant (Cintiq, Nvidia, Windows, Photoshop). I called Adobe yesterday and the technical help person downloaded a RAW photo to test out, which didn't exhibit this issue. I tried doing 'select all / copy all' to a new file and that seemed to resolve the issue for the particular painting I was working on. I saved it as a fresh new psd file and figured that would resolve it. But I opened the fresh psd this morning and it's exhibiting the same problems.

I decided to check with another PSD file of a finished commission, and it's exhibiting the same damn thing.

Here's a PNG where I've screencapped all the zoom stages. You'll have to view the file at 100% zoom to see the issue, because even web preview or windows image viewer does a better job of smoothing the zoom levels than Photoshop is right now. I've circled areas where the difference is especially clear in red but if you look you can see it all over the place. This link will cause it to direct download: https://www.dropbox.com/s/mjs67qr2dfqpakr/PS%20CC%202017%20Zoom%20Anti-aliasing.png?dl=1

If anyone has any suggestions for how to resolve this I would love to hear them! I'm kind of at wits end with how much time I've wasted between yesterday and today on this.

[davescm]

There is only one zoom level in Photoshop that will accurately render your image. That is 100%. At that level the image renders 1 image pixel per screen pixel.

At 66.7% then the pixels have to be merged as 9 image pixels are squeezed into 4 screen pixels.

At 50% or less it gets worse as from that point down a cached 8 bit preview is used to speed up rendering. For most normal use this makes little difference but for detailed checking it does.

Always check blending/sharpening/detail etc at 100% zoom

Dave

[SashaRJones]

I understand that, but how CC 2017 is displaying these zoom levels is drastically poor compared to when I open the copy of CS6 I've been using up until now on the same PC, with the same files. A newer version of a program should not be doing a worse job at a basic function than it's predecessor.

[davescm]

Hi

That is strange - I've not seen any difference in zooming between the versions.  I have both CC2017 and CS6 here - are you able to put a link to an image (or just crop and save part of an image with the issue) and I will try it here. That way we will know is it a general issue , an issue with your file - or something on your system only

Dave

[SashaRJones]

I've updated the link to the photo in my original post to include a comparison to CS6, and you can download the PSD file itself here: Dropbox - Noah test copy.psd

Though the issue seems to be present in all JPGs and PSDs I open on my computer that were not freshly created as a new file within that session of Photoshop CC. So I'm thinking it's not likely to be a file issue.

[davescm]

Hi

These are CC2017.1.1

100% zoom

66.7%

50%

33%

They are not showing that aliasing issue. Can you try turning off your GPU temporarily in preferences and see what it looks like. You will need to restart Photoshop

Dave

[highfivejohn · Accepted solution]

Checking the box labeled 'Use Graphic Processor' under Preferences -> Performance made this issue much better for me.