I have installed a few 8K displays recently, as a part of my job. We are a supplier of bespoke radar surveillance systems and resolution matters in our case. It got me thinking about my display at home that I use for photo editing with darktable.
My display is 24" 1920x1980, I am happy with it and have no plans to upgrade at the moment. It’s a good size and allows me to sit at a comfortable distance. An 8K display has a resolution of 7680x4320, that’s over 33 mega pixels. If the photograph is less than 33 mega pixels then it is very likely that the image will be viewed at 100% zoom in the darkroom and if you want to “zoom in” to check detail then you will have go further than 100% which will introduce interpolation of pixels.
With my 1080P display I can zoom in to 100% without any interpolation.
I just wondered if there is any benefit to having a high resolution display, say 4K or 8K, for photo editing as zooming in to check detail might give a misleading impression. Or is it the case that in practice you just don’t notice.
I am not an expert so take my opinion with a pinch of salt. I don’t like pixel peaking to edit images but I love my 4K 43 inch monitor for editing. The extra pixels and size mean that when I edit a picture and then print it the image only gets better looking with less noise. However, I have one friend who dislikes his 4K monitor and has chosen a 2K monitor because he found he oversharpened with his 4K monitor. I have never experience this problem, but I am very aware of the dangers of over sharpening so maybe I am just more careful from the start. I personally would not want to go back to lower resolution or even size for my editing. If you have a spare 8k monitor send it my way because it sounds great from my perspective, but it might put the graphics card under pressure with editing.
I hope someone can give a more authoritive answer than my opinion that is very pro high resolution.
the higher your display resolution the more resources you need to edit the image.
That’s the reason, why full pixel processing isn’t activated by default.
I find my 4k display made darktable about 4x slower compared to 1080p. So edit with caution.
Beyond that, my 4k display is still the highest resolution my photos will ever see. Even a very large print is never inspected close enough to warrant more resolution.
Thus, personally, I see no reason for higher resolutions than 4k, and in fact often use the color assessment mode to edit a smaller image. I find the overall shapes and contrasts much more important to get right than noisy fine detail.
I don’t pixel peep per se, just a quick zoom in to 100% to check sharpness and focus. I am also learning not to be too obsessed with noise.
The observation I was trying to make was that when I zoom in to 100% on my 1080p monitor, so 1:1 pixel scaling, I do see a more zoomed in image. With an 8K monitor, and a (let’s say 12 mega pixel image as an example) displayed at 100% zoom, it will be smaller on the monitor.
The higher the resolution of the monitor, the smaller a photo will appear at 100% zoom. I just wondered if image quality is noticeably affected when zooming in. (Affect on processing speed is noted).
I’d say 1440 or 4K seems good choices as it gives more real estate than 1080 for tools mainly… To avoid the slow down in DT mentionned by @bastibe I use the “color assessment mode” that put the preview in a fat white frame, reducing the preview size thus reducing the compute time as well.
If you have a beefy config this won’t be such a problem.
TBH color is probably more important for you than resolution. depending on the framerate you want to achieve 1440p might be easier to drive than 4K. I think the highest resolution monitors you can get right now which arent 6k apple displays are things like
I don’t know to be honest, I would have to check. My question is more academic than practical, I am just really curious about what happens when zooming in when the monitor has a much higher resolution that the photograph.
For example, if I zoom in to 400% on my 1080p, the effects are clear to see. I never zoom in more than 100% in practice, I am just stating my observation.
If I had a 4K display, or an 8K, my 12 mega pixel image would need a high level of zoom to fill the screen with an area of interest.
This also makes me wonder what exported jpegs, scaled to some sensible size on export, look like on other peoples higher res monitors. I would have thought small until zoomed in.
I am not obsessing over this, it is just something I became curious about after installing some 8K displays.
Yes, that’s my point. As you keep zooming in after the point of 1:1 “pixel matching”, the pixels have to be interpolated and I wondered if the effect was noticeable when checking for sharpness and focus.
As I say, just a casual wonder in my mind, not particularly important.
It’s weirdly complex. Because demosaicing and diffraction also limit resolution, somewhat below the pixel resolution.
So the 100% image already has some amount of blur. To my eyes, this makes “100%” a somewhat arbitrary boundary that is not easily distinguishable from 75% or 150%. (27" 4k)
Nearest neighbour (or sometimes referred to as “off”) is technically an interpolation, but practically not… if that makes sense. The pixels of screen are assigned the color of the nearest pixel of the scaled image (so there’s no smoothing)
200%; 400%, …: blocks of pixels, no interpolation needed, just copying.
intermediate scales would require interpolation, though.
But that’s not really relevant for what you have to do to the image for scales > 100%. The image is formed after diffraction, demosaicing, and all the other editing steps; this is just about displaying the image on the screen.
That’s the simplest way of displaying such images. Of course, you can interpolate to smooth/anti-alias the image, but is that useful for an editing application (then again, is looking at an image at > 100% useful? some cases, probably, if not anti-aliased, others, I’d say not).
That’s my point, and why I became curious as to what happens on a very high resolution monitor when an image displayed at 100% could be relatively small so you zoom in to check areas of interest.
