GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 686454
Gimp Canvas Content Looks Distorted and Pixelated on Macbook Pro Retina
Last modified: 2014-04-02 20:37:54 UTC
Hello, I am working on GIMP Version 2.8.3 on the Macbook Pro Retina, OS X 10.8.2. The main canvas where one manipulates images shows images out of scale and pixelated on the Macbook Retina display. Even when creating a new image and creating text on the canvas, I able to distinctly see pixelation/fuzzy distortion no matter what zoom settings I apply. Upon actually exporting this text to png format to the mac hard drive and then viewing using the native mac image preview program, the text no longer looks pixelated. This issue makes it difficult to manipulate images because it's hard to predict what the image will look like once completed due to pixelation distorting the image within GIMP. Thanks
Do you mean that editing becomes impossible because something is off-scale globally in the image window, or is it just each sigle pixel that appears like a small square area of several pixels?
Hi Michael, Thanks for responding to the bug report. The issue I am seeing on the Macbook pro retina is the first issue you described, the image is off-scale in the global image window. I have attached a full resolution screenshot that shows what the GIMP main window looks like (pixelated and off scale) while comparing it to OS X's default text edit which shows sharp clear, non pixelated text. I couldn't find a site that could handle the image upload besides RapidShare: http://rapidshare.com/files/4208042223/Screen%20Shot%202012-11-08%20at%207.08.47%20PM.png. It is in png format. Hopefully this help clarifies the issue. Would definitely like to use GIMP at full resolution. Let me know if you need more info. Thanks
Well, it's issue 2, the image is globally OK, but each pixel is displayed as a little square :) Thanks for the screenshot. That's actually a known issue, all images, also icons etc. are drawn at twice the scale, as if retina resolution was not enabled for the app. It's a minor miracle that all the cairo scaling is by default set up so that text and vector shapes are drawn correctly, and that everything appears at the right place. Will be fixed as soon as somebody who knows what to do in GTK's qartz backend owns a retina display :)
Thanks for the snappy response. > "Will be fixed as soon as somebody who knows what to do in GTK's qartz backend owns a retina display :)" Sounds like this may take a while :( I wish I could help here, I have CS background and experience with variety of languages, not much in the part of graphics though. Do we have any ETA on when this could be fixed? or If anyone is trying to to fix it? I think this should probably be a high priority considering displays are all moving towards increasingly higher resolutions.
Is this a duplicate of bug #682178 ?
Partly, bug 682178 covers one aspect of the problem. There is also the issue of rendering images, in both GTK+ and GIMP. Let's keep this bug to rendering the image on the canvas. Note that we can't do anything about the little squares/blocks at 1:1 zoom, we can't render what's not there. GIMP has only pixels and can't be compared to vector based text rendering. We can however take advantage of the higher resulution when zooming out, as in still displaying all pixels at 1:2 zoom.
This is the code that renders the image at high resolution. It's disabled until the resp. GDK API exists. commit 2491a3a088b263bf62834c5f3d6912c853bcc9d0 Author: Michael Natterer <mitch@gimp.org> Date: Fri Jan 18 16:36:22 2013 +0100 app: add (disabled) support for rendering the image at high resolution for what Apple calls "Retina". Disabled because the GDK API to figure the scale factor doesn't exist yet. app/display/gimpdisplayshell-render.c | 32 +++++++++++++++++++++++++------- app/display/gimpdisplayshell-render.h | 8 ++++++++ app/display/gimpdisplayshell.c | 6 ++++-- 3 files changed, 37 insertions(+), 9 deletions(-)
This should be fixed when gimp is ported to GTK3 and when GTK3 finally supports hi-dpi monitors.
GIMP could support retina display (at least when rendering fonts) with a simple trick as described here: http://www.jayway.com/2012/11/11/have-you-just-purchased-a-new-macbook-pro-with-a-retina-display-here-is-a-guide-for-getting-non-retina-ready-applications-to-display-the-correct-resolution/ Practically one needs to add the entries <key>NSHighResolutionCapable</key> <true/> just above the entries </dict> </plist> at the end of file.