Photoshop :: Suddenly Getting A Different Banding Effect When Printing?
May 15, 2013
I've been using Adobe Photoshop CS5 for the last two years and I've started getting a strange banding effect on my prints. Photoshop seems to be the only application that is effected. I print on a large format printer, my drivers are up to date, if I print a smaller size and fit to page (test print) the print is ok. When I print to full size I start having the problem.Â
I like to make drop shadows under our products on our brochures. While they look great on screen, they suffer from banding on the printed pieces via offset printing. Here's how I make them now in CS6: Â Create a layer under the main image.On this layer use Rectangle Marquee tool to create box in location of desired shadow.Hit Shift + F5 and Fill with Black.Deselect the black filled box.Go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and select a radius of 40-80 depending on the size of the image.Go to Filter > Blur > Motion Blur and select a distance of 125 -250 depending on the size of the image. Also select appropriate angle to match image.Â
I've talked to my printer and they said this is fine but they also said to make sure I'm filling the box with only K and not RGB (which I am) and to adjust opacity so it's below 25%. The problem is when I set the opacity of the shadow layer to 25%, the shadows are barely visible. This is not what I want. I want a nice dark shadow under the main portion of the product and the fading out to nothing. The way I do it now looks great on screen so how do I get it to look great on paper?
Does setting the profiles under colour settings alter end image when printed on a printing press or is it just how the colours are viewed on screen?
If I change a profile that is embedded to the one I want will it make any difference to the way the colours print (from the way it printed with the previous profile)?
I am working on a company logo that the owner wants to have a glowing yellow ring on a white background. I have a psd file that someone else created that looks great in color, but when you print it out in black and white, the yellow ring and glow disappear. I have been trying to tell the owner that you can not have bright yellow ring on white and have it come out well when printed in black and white, but he won't let it go.
My question. Can it be done? Is there a way to have some other effect, or gray scale in the background so when printed in black and white it shows well, but when in color it is hidden?
I don't know what version it was created in, but I have the whole CS4 extended creative suite at my disposal.
After playing with a new install of CS3, I see that there is banding in high value pixels. Yet when I open the same file in CS2, the photo is fine. I use a CRT. On my laptop, both versions work fine.
If I make a 16 bit untagged file with a black/white gradient, there are unacceptable bands throughout.
I've tried all of the options from the Color Management Policies: Preserve Embedded profiles; Convert to working RGB; and OFF. My working space is Adobe RGB.
I recently started noticing very bad gradient banding when using the gradient tool. It's specifically bad when using darker colors. I also noticed when using the blur filter I get banding with dark colors also. I am working on 16 bit document. Â [URL]..........
here is a screenshot of what I am seeing. My color mode is RGB Color 16 bit Color profile SRGB  Here are my computer stats  iMac 27-inch, Mid 2011 Processor 2.7 GHz Intel Core i5 Memory 16 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 Graphics AMD Radeon HD 6770M 512 MB Serial Number C02H96AUDHJP Software OS X 10.8.5 (12F37)
airbrush banding, as well as gradient banding? I have my brush set to transfer, pen pressure and smoothing. It seems when I try to lay down a smooth gradient with the airbrush I get this banding effect. If I brush over the same stroke there's a dark spot that forms like a bullet eye that gets bigger and bigger. It's the same with gradients.
Im using PS CS3 with a wacom tablet on an 20 inch alum iMac (the display is CRAP). Im having banding issues when using the airbrush on a dark background. Maybe someone can help me out with this.
Created a new 16 bit RGB image for use within Premiere Pro with an alpha channel enabled. When viewing within Photoshop if I zoom in on the image you can clearly see banding.
i'm working on a 16 bit psd photo file. i'm using an adjustment layer with a layer mask. when i draw a gradient or use the eraser tool on the layer mask i've been noticing a banding pattern.
I'm new here and I'm hoping someone can help me shed some light on a problem we're having. We're seeing a lot of banding around our subject when using curves and/or vignettes. This seems to happen most frequently if we're applying more than one curve to a shot and using masks to affect only part of the image with the curve. Has anyone else had this problem and managed to overcome it?
I have:  Windows Xp Service Pack 3 4GB RAM Geforce 560ti PS CS5 extended  I am a photographer and submit the images to an agency.They inspect images at 100% for technical quality.  While preparing an image today, I used a layer mask in the levels adjustment.I used brush with 0% hardness and just clicked once with black color selected.But I found some severe banding.I alter clicked on the layer mask and found the same banding at 100%.I have not noticed such a thing till date.
[URL].... Â I did try copy pasting the layer mask to show it to you guys, but when I saved it as jpeg and viewed the jpeg file, there was no banding.However I can see the banding even if view the jpeg of the image above.I tried on another images too but the same problem.It used to be very smooth before.Have made no changes to the default settings.Tried with both OpenGL on and off. Â Why does this happen?
i`m trying everything to get the smoothest softest blends possible in photoshop, and I think its possible because Ive seen a lot of digital graphics where it is really nicely done, but mine is a disaster.the banding and artifacts in it are disheartening. whether with brush or gradient, even on small areas like 7 to 12 inches. I'm not talking about poster size just average A4 pages being painted. Â I've used the brush tool on the softest setting, and a wacom bamboo tablet, with pen pressure determines opacity seeming to produce the best results, low opacity to try build it up, opaque etc, and very close tones, as close as possible, and the gradients don't fair much better, Â is this the way it is or is there another technique to get smooth blends with the brush or gradients? the colour picker seems to have smooth silky powdery blends, I thought it would be possible to paint like this with the airbrush in PS but it doesn't produce this kind of softness.. of course the colour picker is code generated not with a brush,,
-here the brush is used on 3 types of settings, the last being with pen pressure determines opacity producing better results, but not what I expected.
-here I used a large soft brush which was larger than the oval, and a few swipes across but I can still see artifacts or shapes in there,
Using CS6, I created a sky gradient on a new layer, then imported some photos to other layers for a composite. Then I noticed horizontal banding of varying widths in the sky area of the gradient. When I use the Move Tool to move the gradient layer around, the bands move along in a fixed position, so it's not my monitor. When I Option-click on the gradient layer eyeball icon to make just that layer visible, there is no banding on the screen, just a smooth gradient as it should be.  I have never noticed this happening before. What causes it and what can I do about it?Â
I'm working on a project and I'm painting a robot which is in a dark grey. I need to be able to paint in the shadows but Photoshop is going haywire with rendering the gradients. I'm simply using a round brush with 30% opacity and 20% flow. What I'm getting is some VERY ugly jaggedy stepping of tone.
My current project dimension are 5000 x 3000 px. I don't get what is going on. I have not changed blending modes, nor am I using any alternate modes on my brush. All the settings are pretty much out of the box, except for the global settings I mentioned above.
I'm a digital illustrator and I've been using PS for years and I've never run into this problem before. I'm runnin PS CS6 on Windows 7 pro with an NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX+ video card.
I have a problem with color banding in Photoshop CS6 while zoomed out, even though I am working in 16 bit. Here is a crop of the same area of a .psd while open in Photoshop CS6 (left) and in Illustrator CS5 (right). Â The banding is quite apparent in PS while not present in Illustrator. At 100% zoom there is little banding in PS, and converting to 8 bit makes it look markedly worse. However at 25% zoom (which these crops were taken at) converting to 8 bit makes no visible difference, making me think that Photoshop's zoom is working at 8 bit for some reason. Â Since the image looks fine in Illustrator I'm pretty sure it's not a problem with my display, or graphics card/driver. I've tried changing the color profile (currently set to Adobe RGB) in Photoshop without effect. I've also tried changing the 'Graphics Processor' level in Photoshop, including disabling it entirely, as well as reducing the cache level to '1' without effect either. I'm not quite sure why Illustrator is able to handle the image so nicely at all zoom levels while Photoshop introduces all this banding.
I did something with photo , but when I put it on web site - it doesn't have the same quality . it has gray circles in it . I save the photo as jpg file , the size is 500*600 px and the weight is 120 kb .
I just took a photo of mine and add her some filters like the lens filder and spotlight...
I attched the photo (the way she look on the web) . in the original it doesn't have the gray circles in it .
Just upgraded from CS2 to CS3: I always shoot in RAW, then zoom in 100% in RAW converter to check quality. I also work in 16 bit and using CS2 the tonal gradation is brilliant. However the same photo opened with CS3 Bridge shows banding when I zoom in. Same happens when I convert and open the image in Photoshop. Great in CS2, banding appears in CS3.
i just opened ps, and was about to work on some client stuff.... same as ususal. hit the brush tool... no different from yesterday, same default settings, and my brush started doing some weird patterns... as if all the smoothing on the brush was gone. Looks like a bullseye when i apply the brush a number of times in one spot. (brush hardness = 0). very strange. I couldnt find anything wrong, and i didnt change my settings from the day before...? So i just updated my display drivers for my nvidia 8800 gts... and same issues... only with the brushes... gradients are still smooth? heres a screen shot of what im getting.Â
When I'm viewing photo at zoom lower than 64% banding kicks in. At zoom higher than 63% everything smoothed out. It's giving me a hard time when I'm trying to retouch big files at lower magnification because actually I cant know until I zoom in do I'm removing something what exist or actually not!
I know it's an issue regards do displaying preview of 16bit image as 8bit image. I was checking this in many ways and it appears only in 16bit mode. I'm quite a quality maniac so I always retouch in 16bit mode and ProPhoto color space to give myself a bit more room to play with post production.
Please take a look at snaps made using windows snipping tool. All images are in ProPhoto color space but I also have tried this in RGB and it looks quite the same.
1. With banding. 16bit mode ProPhoto color space Zoom: 63%
1. Without banding. 16bit mode ProPhoto color space Zoom: 64%
I'm on windows 7 ultimate 64bit, 64GB memory, Intel I7 processor, geforec GTX680 GPU.
I'm on an old laptop, PS 5.5. I have a properly exposed iso 1800 D600 jpgcaptured in adobe rgb color space.I use camera raw to open this picture in photopro space and 16 bits to avoid banding and yet if I lift the curve a tiny bit or any other brightening trickimmediately there is banding. What?
Working on a night shot of a building and processed through ACR7.2 and forgot to reduce the noise - and opened in Photoshop. Went to Filter/Reduce Noise and immediately get wierd banding in the window blinds. This banding is there regardless of the noise reduction settings and could not get it to go away - See attached screen shot of before and after applying the filter. So I went back and opened the file again in ACR7.2 and applied the Noise Reduction there and bingo, noise level dropped and looked good with no banding. Looks like the Noise Reduction capabilities in ACR7.2 are way better than the Noise Reduction filter - but surely the banding should not be there; especially if images do not get processed through Camera RAW.  Running latest version of Photoshop CS6 (latest patches applied), Windows 7 x64 16GB RAM, Intel 4000 with latest drivers installed. Camera file was ACR2 from Canon 5DMKII imported as a DNG file - then opened in ACR 7.2  Before Image Opened in Photoshop before applying the Noise Reduction Filter. After Image in Photoshop after applying the Noise Reduction Filter. Seems like a bug to me .By the way, the screen captures are from the image viewed at 100%.
I shot a TV set and we decided to add a white to transparent gradient on the otherwise black TV screen to create depth for shaping.
What I did was create a circular gradient in the top left corner of the TV set. It has been set to go from White to Transparent. Then I reduced the opacity to around 40% to make it seem more realistic. The problem is that there are very visible bands from where it starts to where it fades out. These are visible from 100% opacity and downwards. I want the transitions to be smooth smooth smooth My Layer Blend mode is set to normal Will changing the blend mode help? I did try to use different blend modes and nothing changed.
I'm Using CS2 9.0.2 on Powerbook with Cinema Display
Gradient and color banding are very apparent and exaggerated until I zoom in to 66.6%. It even hangs for a split second as if it is solving a new render at a higher quality. This is getting frustrating as I've found myself manually trying to clean up issues that actually aren't there when I zoom in close enough. These issues are expecially obvious when working with skin using several degrunge techniques and dodge and burn on a softlight layer. It does not seem to matter what display I use. Â If I commit all adjustments to a new layer the problem goes away. I'm working on a Eurocom Panther 3 running Windows 7 64 Ultimate. I have a hex core Intel processor and 2 Nvidia 580m in SLI, though I am aware that is not used in Photoshop.
When I view my images in DPP they look perfect however the minute I open them in PScs5 they look terrible..... the colours in the shadow areas are blocky and banding appears....... I am guessing that PS is just not using the correct profile to open them but all the setting look sensible and match my friends version of PS. I am running Windows 7 on a PC with an ATI HD 6570 Graphics Card with version 12.3 drivers.