• Adobe Photoshop

  Smoother gradients??

  Posted by Jack Sewell on January 3, 2010 at 6:10 pm

  Hi there,

  I’m working with an image with a black to white gradient for the background and am wondering how to get the gradient smoother. It’s quite a large gradient in terms of the change from black to white relative to the amount of space it’s covering.

  However, I’m finding that it’s quite streaky, with the gradient moving from a darker colour in a few lines and then back to a lighter shade. Is there anyway of getting completely smooth gradients? Or is that plug-in territory?

  many thanks,
  Jack

  Paul Benson replied 16 years, 4 months ago 4 Members · 4 Replies
• 4 Replies

• 

  Cagan Yuksel

  January 3, 2010 at 8:55 pm

  Try to work in higher resolution (16 to 32 bit) and add 1.5 or 2. monochromatic grain on top of your gradient. This should kill your banding problem.

  CY

  Art Direction – Design / Motion – New Media / Live
• 

  Jack Sewell

  January 4, 2010 at 9:22 pm

  thanks that was a really big help. Increasing to 32 bit helped a lot and the noise does help create a better transition to black. However, there still wasn’t a completely smooth transition into black. Is there any way of achieving this without using real light?

  many thanks…….
• 

  Allen Strand

  January 6, 2010 at 8:26 am

  Look at the Wikipedia post on duotones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duotone or the Photoshop discussion on the same topic. Per Photoshop documentation

  Duotones increase the tonal range of a grayscale image. Although a grayscale reproduction can display up to 256 levels of gray, a printing press can reproduce only about 50 levels of gray per ink. For this reason, a grayscale image printed with only black ink can look significantly coarser than the same image printed with two, three, or four inks, each individual ink reproducing up to 50 levels of gray.

  My apologies if this is isn’t what you need.
• 

  Paul Benson

  January 11, 2010 at 4:28 pm

  Just some other possibilities…
  – Are you viewing at 100% scale? Sometimes zooms other than 100% show banding that is not really there.
  – Are you using a ‘cheap’ flatscreen monitor? Trying a different display (especially CRT) may show the gradient differently.
  – Since you saw improvement by changing the bit depth, this one may not be relevant, but make sure your video card settings are set to max bit depth.

  Pauley

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