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banding on gradients
Hello,
Can anyone explain to me why banding occurs in gradients?
I’ve been told it has something to do with 8bit per channel color and it’s limited colorspace but how do I get around this? Is there a workaround to smooth out my grads?ian
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4 Replies
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You can work in 16bpc to smooth the gradient further, or add noise/dithering to the gradient to make it appear smoother.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
Thank you very much. Working in 16bpc certainly helped. I’m afraid I don’t quite get the add dithering recommendation though. Could you explain further?
ian
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Adding noise to a gradient, or dithering the gradient (which essentially adds noise but in a more intelligent manner), will cause the straight lines you see to have more of a diffuse characteristic. So instead of seeing bands of quantization in your colors, the colors become more integrated as the pixels of each color move across the line and form a diffuse edge rather than a straight edge (there is still the same number of colors/the same quantization, it only appears less banded).
Changing to 16bpc should actually increase the number of colors that can be represented from 16,777,216 to 281,474,976,710,656 =)
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
great. feel like I’ve learned alot. thank you.
I’m not finding the dither checkbox on the “layer styles” gradient overlay. I do see it when using the tool manually. so that solves that.. I’ll only use the gradient tool from the tools window to take advantage of the dithering/diffuse qualities. thanks again.ian
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