How to Enable Retina on Adobe Creative Suite Applications … sort of

You bought the biggest, baddest boy on the block, yet it doesn’t do the actual stuff you bought the Retina Macbook Pro for, where it actually benefits to have a retina screen: the Adobe Creative Suite.

Adobe doesn’t support Retina with CS6, and will offer partial support for CS7 apps, one of which that are not supported being InDesign. Ridiculous? Yes. But this is Adobe—they sure as hell know we have no other choice. If you have a complaint about this, please make your own, and I’ll throw lots of money at your direction.

The curious thing is using a CS application on a normal resolution display is much better than using it on a retina one. Normal res. apps on a retina screen look blurry and pixelated, and somehow it’s far worse than they would look on a non-retina computer. It’s so gross that the conspiracy theorist in me tells that it’s knowingly left this way. But more importantly, it means you’re going to see pixels that don’t exist in your working document but shown because your computer is upsampling the entire application without telling about it to the app, and doing it very crudely. That’s a little bit of a problem.

Anyway, here’s the thing. Install Display Menu application from the App Store. It enables resolutions not shown on System Preferences > Displays . Open your CS application, and pick the highest resolution available, which will be your screen’s actual resolution. For me (15.4 inch Retina Macbook Pro) it’s 2880x1800, for the 13 inch model, it should be 2560x1600. When you enable this mode, the UI will become ridiculously small, so you probably won’t want to use it as your daily driver. I personally use it when I want to see what I’m working on in high resolution, and return back, as the application is not very usable with tiny UI that appears on this mode.