Prior to getting my Retina MacBook Pro, I was a longtime Adobe Lightroom user. After getting my rMBP, I was faced with the decision between Aperture and Lightroom. Right now, Photoshop and Lightroom have not yet received their updates for Retina display yet, while Apple has “optimized” Aperture for use on their new display. I had used Aperture before, but I didn’t like the consolidated library, the way it cached previews, and its general sluggishness on my old Core 2 Duo 15-inch MacBook Pro. However, with the Retina MacBook Pro’s quad-core i7, Retina display, and flash storage, I felt that these problems would all be much less bothersome and the Retina optimization might be worth tolerating them. However, because I really needed to keep my photo library distributed among various external storage devices and even internal partitions, I decided to stick with Lightroom.

I was glad to see that Lightroom did have some form of Retina-compatibility. The images and thumbnails appear to be shown in Retina display, although I’m not sure how 1:1 it actually is. Compared to Quick Look in Finder, which displays images in 100% pixel for pixel Retina, photos in Lightroom look about the same, so I’m quite confident that Lightroom does utilize the Retina display. The colors look much better on the Retina display in comparison to the previous MacBook Pros. The difference is very noticeable. The navigation in Lightroom and the various text and form windows all appear in full Retina (unlike some other applications, like pre-Retina-update Microsoft Office).