staircasing or stepped effect when painting in photoshop

#1

Hi,
while painting textures in photoshop with regular brush with opacity set to 30%, after a few strokes I start seeing visible stepped patterns like banding.Is this normal or is there a way around it.Please check attached image with the marked area.Thanks in advance.

#2

In the brush palette you can decrease the “spacing” value. That will fix it.

#3

Hi Laserschwert,
done that already.Not sure why it is showing this banding.I have tried to move to 16 bit also just to check if it was a bit issue but that too did not remove this.Anyone having faced similar issues can throw light on this.
Thanks.

#4

Looking at the colour values, I think there’s just not enough range to smoothly transition from one to the other dark value. Working in 16 bit internally does work, but again: your screen will not be able to handle those subtle colour values, and the banding will still occur visually.

Blame the limits of TFT technology - details in dark areas will be lost. CRT’s worked much better in this regard, and had a wider gamut. The effect should not be so pronounced on a colour-calibrated screen (mine), but it is still there. There is just not enough range to deal with this.

One solution: add noise/dithering to hide the banding. And avoid working with too narrow ranges across larger areas.

#5

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