Is this guy right about 4k on mac?

[willie45]

I was looking for a monitor recently and I came across this video. The relevant part starts around 4.40

I'm a bit confused and I'm not sure he's right about the viewing at 100% thing and even if he is, if it matters at all. I use my macs for editing with Capture One or Affinity Photo and before that with Lightroom and Photoshop and I'm now starting getting to grips wtih Final Cut Pro. I've mainly run iMacs or a 24" 1920 x 1080 NEC screen up until now and I've never bothered about it, though I've just bought a 32" 4k monitor so I'm naturally interested in how all this stuff works out.

What say you guys?

 

[lin2log]

He clearly has no clue what he's talking about when it comes to macOS. Display size is utterly irrelevant. He clearly doesn't even know what things such as "PPI" are or even why macOS does what it does. It is in fact far superior to what Winblows does.

 

[Lihp8270]

He clearly has no clue what he's talking about when it comes to macOS. Display size is utterly irrelevant. He clearly doesn't even know what things such as "PPI" are or even why macOS does what it does. It is in fact far superior to what Winblows does.

Referring to winblows while underlining superior, removes all legitimacy in your opinion and just makes your post look a little foolish.

 

[Lihp8270]

MacOS has always been a bit weird and unintuitive for scaling.

If you look around the forum you’ll see lots of posts and comments about scaling cause oddities.

 

[Lihp8270]

He clearly has no clue what he's talking about when it comes to macOS. Display size is utterly irrelevant. He clearly doesn't even know what things such as "PPI" are or even why macOS does what it does. It is in fact far superior to what Winblows does.

Display size is relevant when discussing the user interface.

Being forced into 4K UI on a relatively small display makes the UI unreadable for many, but less of an issue on large displays.

Similarly, large displays being forced into 1080 results in a huge UI.

 

[willie45]

I should have been more specific in my question. I'd really like to know why he's right or wrong. I get the smaller text bit and it's unfortunate, but I can just about cope with that.

I also have read up about how mac retains all of the 4k information in scaling so that even if you view at 1080, 4k or an intermediate scaling, all the 4k clarity and detail is preserved which seems pretty good to me, however, what I'm really interested in is the "viewing images at 100%" bit. I'm struggling to get my head around it TBH.

Is there a downside to the way Mac does this and if so, I'm assuming you'd just start to view at 200% or 400% to get around it.

Can someone explain the differences to my ailing old brain or point me to a resource to educate me?

Thank youf.

 

[Starfia]

The guy in the video isn't particularly articulate, but I don't think he's saying anything that's incorrect. (When he says "you won't have this issue on Windows," I'm not even sure what "issue" he's referring to.)

I'm still not sure exactly what you're asking about "viewing images at 100%."

Here are a few observations in case these relate to what you're wondering:

macOS (and iOS) use unilateral concepts of "pixels" (the smallest image element a hardware display is capable of displaying), and "points" (the abstract concept of what has traditionally been about the size of one pixel). Before display technology reached the era of "Retina" or "HiDPI," one pixel and one point were effectively interchangeable terms. With the first Retina display (on the iPhone 4), so many more hardware pixels could be crammed into so much less physical space that for that device, one "point" was deemed equal to two "pixels" along one dimension. The hardware resolution of the iPhone 4 was 640x960, but for the purpose of developers who were now able to start thinking in "points," the resolution was also considered to be "320x480 @2x". Some of today's iPhones are even denser, achieving an "@3x" working resolution – three pixels per point along one dimension. All of this has enabled display resolution to advance independently without messing up designers' lexicon – no matter the display's native DPI, the Mac's menu bar, for example, will continue to be about 24 "points" tall.

All that said: since it's resultingly possible, those system-level Display settings are available, and they effectively alter macOS's treatment of the relationship between a point and a pixel, so that the entire interface will scale.

I think the way an image editing app like Preview, Photoshop or Pixelmator handles the display of an image is probably up to the app. I'm using my iMac at an "@2x" resolution, and I've opened a few images in Preview. The images open by default at some reasonable-looking size, but when I select "Actual Size" from the View menu, the image is presented so that one of the image's pixels equals one display point. (That is, the image is shown at the same size it would appear natively presented on a traditional "@1x" display.)

I've just opened an image in Pixelmator Pro, and unlike Preview, its version of "100%" seemed to be based on matching image pixels to hardware pixels – the image was presented at half the width and height that Preview had chosen. I'd have to ask Pixelmator Pro to display it at its "200%" for its size to match Preview's size.

I've used this Mac for four years and had never noticed that difference in behaviour until you'd prompted me to check, so I certainly wouldn't consider it an "issue."

 

[willie45]

Thank you for your explanation.

I might well not have understood but could you please clarify for me: how does this introduction of "points" relate to pixels on a digital image?

I always understood that viewing an image at 100% meant that each pixel of the image was represented by a single pixel on the monitor.

From what I can gather the guy on the video was saying there was an issue about the way Mac OS handled scaling which meant that unless he had his monitor running at either 3840 x 2160 or 1920 x 1080 it would not render his images at this 1:1 ( or 100%) ratio.

To demonstrate this, he showed the different appearances of images as displayed by Photoshop at 100% ( as defined by the app ) on Mac OS and Windows. On windows the size of actual dimensions of the image on the screen remained constant when displayed at full resolution and using windows zoom to increase text size. In orther words he was always able to see the image at 100% displayed correctly and at the same time read app menu text comfortably in windows whereas in mac when he used mac's scaling to show "looks like" a lower resolution this wasn't the case.

He used this change in the physical size of the images using mac scaling to deduce that windows was thererfore superior at rendering photographic images on a 4k monitor. This was the issue he found.

I guess he's saying its only an issue for photographers who need to be able to read their app text while editing images at 100%

 

[Starfia]

That sounds like a reasonable inference about what the guy in the video was getting at.

I can't think of a clearer way to explain points versus pixels than I already gave: a pixel is the hardware quantum of the display, and a "point" is one abstract unit of screen space approximately the size of a traditional pixel. In modern high-density displays, one point can be represented by multiples of one pixel instead of just one. (That's what "high-density display" means.) If I'm still not doing well with that, I'll have to defer to others' explanations, and here's Steve Jobs outlining it in 2010:

You'd apparently be right about Pixelmator Pro (and possibly Photoshop, which I don't have) – evidently "100%" does mean that one pixel of the digital image is represented by one hardware pixel. Preview doesn't use the term "100%" at all – its "actual size" evidently represents one pixel of the image with one point. (In my case using an "@2x" resolution, each point is represented by an area of two by two pixels.)

Perhaps the confusing element is the macOS Displays preference the video guy highlighted, where the leftmost option is labelled "larger text." That strikes me as an excessively "user-friendly" choice of label, because that option simply uniformly scales everything the system displays, and apps would be agnostic to it. So it has the side effect of scaling text, but there's no dedicated sense in which it's an option meant to adjust text size specifically – so text appears larger, menus and buttons appear larger, and images in apps appear larger. As I mentioned last reply, it effectively changes the size of a "point," so that one point is represented by more pixels when choosing the leftmost option, and one point is represented by one pixel when choosing the rightmost ("more space") option.

I wouldn't know offhand, but perhaps Windows does have an option that specifically scales text while leaving other interface elements and app renderings untouched. (iOS's "dynamic text" feature also does this.)

 

[willie45]

Thank you once more. I guess this is the way mac works and I'm assuming some apps will work better than others with it. Anyway, I'm not going to lose sleep. I'm having enough hassle hooking up my new monitor to the eGpu at the moment. It's causing me grief which shows you the level of technical expertise I currently sport ?