Sharpness Assessment on MacBook Pro 16" (2022)

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Doomrider74

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Hi Folks,

What zoom percentage do you folk use in Lightroom for assessing sharpness on a MacBook Pro 16"? I was watching a recent video by Steve and he mentioned different zoom percentages, depending on whether he was editing on a 5K screen or a more standard hi-res screen (200% on the former, 100% on the latter), and the MacBook falls approximately between the two, @ 3.5K, so should I be assessing sharpness and noise @ 200% on the MacBook as well, or will 100% do?

Thanks.
 
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What size do you plan to view them? That's what I'd use, and not get too wrapped up in the technical. Steve was performing a tech and performance review for the gear, was he not? That has its place, but is not necessarily the best for enjoying and sharing your photos.
 
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Do you make photos as a hobby and post them on social media? Do you print them in big size? Don't stress too much on zoom percentages and trust your eyes when viewing your photos. If you are a hobbyist do you take photos for yourself, not for others, not for likes. If you are a pro pretty sure you would not have asked the question.
Again, photography tips & tricks are not written in stone, adapt those to your way of shooting & post processing.
 
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it depends on screen resolution, screen size and viewing distance. The resolving power of your eyes is the determining factor. For really critical sharpness review you should probably take an image that you know is critically sharp, let’s say a lanscape shot taken from a tripod with lots of fine detail and zoom in in steps, starting at 100%, take 25% steps. Keep doing this until you don’t see any difference in detail between the last step and the previous step. The step before last was the optimal zoom for your setup. But as earlier commenters said, critical sharpness at full resolution is not always needed, it depends on your end use.
 
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Doomrider74 said:
No, I was referring to his recent Lightroom Denoise video.
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I see your point now. For image processing and self-critique, I typically view at 50%, unless the image is heavily cropped, then I go higher. It really ends up as a personal preference; if I have reason to be more detailed and harsh in my self-critique, I view larger, in increments, which gives me some idea of how large I might be able to print an image.
 
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FWIW

If you look in your system for displays and activate the option for displaying all resolutions as a list you'll see that the Retina Displays are listed with 2560 x 1440 as stadard resolution. The increasing of IQ on these displays is so to say achieved by using four physical pixels to mimic 1 logical pixel better / with more accuracy. You can check by really switching to 5120 x 2880 and look what happens to the readability of your GUI.

Bildschirmfoto 2024-02-18 um 19.39.08.png



So from this perspective the zoom level for checking should not make a difference and to me it really doesn't. Why ?

Well, I have my home office setup with two Studio Displays and a secondary office setup that I can carry to a client for longer on site work during a project and for this I use two DELL UP2716D displays with physicel resolution 2560 x 1440, connected to the MBP via Thundervolt Mini Dock with 2 HDMI ports. Currently this setup is sitting at my girl friend's home and I am occasionally editing photos there as well. In terms of sharpness checks I use 100% on both work places and I didn't experience any miss-judgement when looking at the same image on the one versus the other setup.
 
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Woodpecker said:
FWIW

If you look in your system for displays and activate the option for displaying all resolutions as a list you'll see that the Retina Displays are listed with 2560 x 1440 as stadard resolution. The increasing of IQ on these displays is so to say achieved by using four physical pixels to mimic 1 logical pixel better / with more accuracy. You can check by really switching to 5120 x 2880 and look what happens to the readability of your GUI.

View attachment 82037


So from this perspective the zoom level for checking should not make a difference and to me it really doesn't. Why ?

Well, I have my home office setup with two Studio Displays and a secondary office setup that I can carry to a client for longer on site work during a project and for this I use two DELL UP2716D displays with physicel resolution 2560 x 1440, connected to the MBP via Thundervolt Mini Dock with 2 HDMI ports. Currently this setup is sitting at my girl friend's home and I am occasionally editing photos there as well. In terms of sharpness checks I use 100% on both work places and I didn't experience any miss-judgement when looking at the same image on the one versus the other setup.
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Interesting, and thanks for the information. I've just done that and it appears that the resolution of my MacBook is set at 1728 x 1117 as default. I guess this begs the question: "is it worth running my MacBook at a higher resolution?

Edit: It doesn't appear to make a huge difference if I go up to 2056 x 1329. Any higher than that and the GUI becomes too small.
 
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Doomrider74 said:
nteresting, and thanks for the information. I've just done that and it appears that the resolution of my MacBook is set at 1728 x 1117 as default. I guess this begs the question: "is it worth running my MacBook at a higher resolution?
Click to expand...

Well, this the same for me if I look to the standard resolution of the internal screen of my MPB. The figures above refer to my Studio Displays.

However, the answer to your question is NO. Why ?

Why, well it took me a while to finfd out when I changed to the Apply univers in winter 2022 and I thought of which displays to get. For obviouos reasons measured in € or $ I checked for using 4K monitors rather than the Studio Displays, but I then found out that if I want 27" displays the best solution is indeed 1440p (2560 x 1440) or 5K. The reason is that, as opposed to the Windows world the Apple GUI works slighlty different, being optimized for resolutions that are an integer multiple of 110 ppi.

A 27" 2560x1440 display is almost exactly 110 ppi (non-Retina), a 5K Studio-Display is almost exactly 220ppi (Retina).
The funny resolution you find for your MBP display is coming from thriving for 220ppi resolution (i.e. Retina) on a different size, i.e. the the physical pixel size on a 5K Studio display is ideally exactly the same size as on your MBP display.

Her are two links that helped me to understand it after 30 years of windows GUI ;)


https://bjango.com/articles/macexternaldisplays/

I think the only reason why @Steve sometimes goes on 200% in his comparisons and reviews is because he needs to make small differences more obvious in his videos, because the true resolution you get locally can't normally be shown in a video with typically lower resolution, but this is only an "educated guess" - as George Clooney would name it.

Does that make sense for you ?
 
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