Retina Display Export Settings?

Question

I recently bought a new 13 inch Macbook Pro with the Retina Display and was super excited to use it with Lightroom 4. I began to edit and export photos for airplane-pictures.net for upload. The website requires that the photos be a .jpg file between 1024px and 1600px on the long edge and less than 3MB. On my old MBP (Macbook Pro), I always exported photos with the same settings at 1280px on the long edge with 72ppi, and a quality of 80 and high sharpening for screen. I did the same thing with my new Retina Display MBP and the photos look terrible. There is an excessive amount of jaggies that make the image look really over sharpened and even out of focus before and after uploading. (I have tried adjusting quality, pip, and screen sharpening but they have resulted in no improvement) However, if I keep those settings, but I don't resize the image at all and leave the "resize to fit" box unchecked and is opened in Preview, the photos look beautiful, AND they are fit perfectly in my 1280px screen. So it's like the photo is automatically resized when I export it without checking the box and it seemingly fits at 1280px, however the website will not accept at the large proportions of something like 5363px × 3352px. Does that make sense? In short, when I resize the photo in export to 1280px, it looks awfully out of focus and over sharpened, but when I don't resize the image and open it in Preview it fits to my screen and looks gorgeous! Has anyone used Lightroom 4 with the Retina Display and figured out some sort of solution? Again, when I used these same settings on my OLD MBP the photos looked just as great.
Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

The website needs to understand how to serve images to retina (or the windows equivalent - hiDPI) machines. Many are not. Many websites need some extra code: for example this: Jao's photo blog: A much simpler way to serve retina displays the right images . Image sites like flickr, smugmug, 500px etc, all do this correctly if you upload large enough images but those are exceptions. Also, even if you are using a website that understands how to do this, your browser might not be new enough to ask for the higher res image. Only newer versions of Firefox and Chrome do this. Safari has always done it right since the retina machines came out and on iPads and iPhones.
My guess is that the website you are using is not doing this right. Which is not surprising as these displays are still fairly uncommon. So your website probably resizes the image at the size it is thinking it is displaying on normal screens.
Lastly, high sharpening is usually too much. Also think about the size you need. A 13" retina has a 2560-by-1600 pixel resolution. A 1280 pixel wide image will look good when it takes up about 50% of the width of your display. At that size it will be about 1 pixel in the file per pixel on the screen. If it is displayed larger, it will look unsharp. So think about how wide on the display it will be shown and determine from that your maximum size you need. Preview is not a good gauge as it by default doesn't show 1:1. You need to change the setting in the preview preferences->images to be "1 image pixel equals 1 screen pixel" and then do a command-zero on your exported file to see what it actually looks like. Also, this only works correctly if you set the resolution of your screen in System preferences to "best for display"