Hey guys I’m having this serious problem with gradient banding in my work. It gets to the point where I can even paint anything due to it looking terrible. I’ve tried many fixes online but I can seem to get anything to work.
Thanks in advance for the help.
Here’s an example of this. New Document. I colored it dark blue/green and used the 300px Soft Round brush. It already shows extreme banding
EDIT - HERE’S THE FULL-SIZE IMAGE. This is what I’m seeing on my screen.
You mentioned that you have tried several fixes, without telling us exactly what…
The “make sure it’s plugged in” solutions are:
[ul]
[li]Check your color space - make sure you are using the right profile[/li][li]Zoom in to 100%[/li][li]Check your monitor profile, too[/li][li]Check any blend modes in your painting setup - layers, brushes, adjustment layers, etc.[/li][/ul]Other solutions to banding in soft gradients include adding a small amount of noise (0.2%) to the final, then lower opacity and mask so the noise is only in the affected areas (you can also try using some blend modes here, all depends on your specific image).
Also, go ahead and render out (save as a tiff, PNG or high quality JPG) to see if the problem persists. Post that example, and info on the above questions…
Arighty I did all the things you said to do
There’s still huge gradient banding even on a new document (16bits) with just a single soft round brush.
This is becoming a huge problem when I’m making a painting and all my blending starts to look terrible due tot he banding.
This is a very common problem. And there are many factors that could make it better or worst (Ex. Length of transition between your colors on a gradient, color selection, size of the smoothing attr of the brush, Monitors, color models/spaces, bit depth, among a ton of other things that can cause the issue). A simple yet effective solution to your problem is by adding a little bit of monochromatic noise to the image gradient. (Noise filter) Make sure is subtle.
I hope this helps.
Try making the gradient in 32 bit mode or convert to 32 bit and blur in that mode. You will see much more banding during the blurring due to lower color range of the monitors but when you converted back to 8 bits it should be much better.
it should look fine in 8bit
trying to exclude one thing at the time seems to be the only way in this case
i don’t think it’s a monitor problem since we all see this on our monitors
are you using a mouse or a tablet? are you getting same results with both?
i’d check the brush settings first
the problem seems to be exactly the same in both pics. there’s a thicker ring in exactly the same place
I brought your posted image into PShop.
I sampled the extreme colours and duplicated the gradient. Mine looked awesome. Dither was turned on. I turned dither off and mine banded. Finer and more regular than yours.
When I sample the colors in my bands, each band is off by one in RGB space from its neighbour.
When I sample the colors in your bands, each is off by (usually) two from its neighbour. I suspect we are seeing the same thing and why yours is that extra bit chunkier is due to JPEG simplifying to increase compression. It’ll do that. Particularly with color proximity.
Quite simply - you are getting banding because 24 bit RGB color isn’t really enough. Especially if green is involved. If you replicate your image in red/orange you’ll probably see less banding. PShop is taking the smallest steps it can.
If your gradient is made with the gradient tool, turn Dither on.
Sorry, longwinded.
As others have posted previously, banding is an effect of several combined factors: the colours used, the hardware (especially cheaper tft’s), etc. For example, I recreated your gradient, and using black on a dark blue background with a brush that size, there just aren’t enough hues in 8bit to make a smooth blend. The screen technology used may even exasperate the problem: in my case I use both a high quality LaCie crt, and a high quality tft screen (which is able to produce 100% srgb after calibration) - low and behold, the banding is much less pronounced on my crt, because its hardware is able to display a wider colour gamut (range). I added 0.33% monochromatic noise in Photoshop, which got rid of most of the banding, even on the tft screen. Adding some noise to the background color BEFORE applying the brush works quite well too.
When you start working in 16bit or 32bit, Photoshop does have enough hues available internally to make a smooth blend between the dark colours you chose - however, the screen hardware is still limited, and will not be able to visualize those smooth blends. Internally they are, though.
I remember working in Art Department Pro on the Amiga: although the software was able to work with 24bit images internally, my Amiga’s video hardware couldn’t cope with that, and showed the images with a maximum of 256 colours onscreen. In the end, the final output is dependent on the limits of your output hardware - actually printing your example image would most likely only worsen the banding effect (well, depending on the print technology used).
So, to resolve this:
PS the images you posted were saved as jpg’s - bad idea, because it actually worsens the banding effect due to compression artifacts (depending on compression quality).
Do they still sell those?
My newest crt is now about 6 years old and exhibits sings of aging so I’m thinking of buying monitors but I haven’t seen an lcd that can give a better picture. What monitors people buy these days for professional work including print? The colors on my crt are very close to printed materials, are lcds now capable of this?
Perhaps I overstated the crt<–>lcd issue somewhat. Today’s quality lcd’s do work quite well for print / photography work. See
http://www.acuitydesigns.net/what-is-the-best-22-24-28-30-graphic-design-photography-monitor/
for a list.
Of course, Eizo ColorEdge screens are nice too - though at a price.
Hey hvanderwegen, great pointer! very much appreciated:thumbsup:.
That was an awesome link. Exactly what I needed.
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=39226
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