Image banding is a lesser-discussed phenomenon in photography, but it can leave annoying artifacts that can degrade the quality of your photos or ever outright ruin them in some circumstances. This informative video discusses three types of image banding, including why they occur and what you can do to mitigate or entirely eliminate them in your own work.
Coming to you from Wes Perry, this excellent video discusses three types of image banding and what you can do to stop them from happening in your photos. Image banding can be a very distracting thing, and it is important to be aware of the situations in which it might arise. Regarding the third type, which happens due to the imperceptible pulsing of many types of lights, in recent years, many cameras have implemented anti-flicker options which slightly delay the timing of the shutter to minimize this effect (which can save you loads of time in post). The downside is that the slight delay may affect your timing and reduce your burst rate, but I've generally found the increased consistency to be well worth the tradeoff. If you are shooting a newer Canon camera, enable the "Anti-flicker shoot." option in the shooting menu. If you are shooting on a Sony camera, enable the "Anti-flicker Shoot." option in the Shooting Assist menu. Check out the video above for more from Perry.
Great article.
I didn’t mention anti-flicker as it’s generally to reduce inconsistency in the exposure of the entire frame. So without it you could have bright and dark images alternating with one another, but while using anti flicker the shutter will align with the brightest output of the light each time to give you more consistent exposure. It rarely has much effect on banding artifacts (in my personal experience at least). In terrible LED lighting situations the best I found it did was make the banding more consistent 😂 (on the a7iii specifically).
Your link is broken
Do you know if this could have some effect on Hyper Sync?
Afraid I don’t have any hands on experience with Pocket Wizards, sorry.
Generally, though, hyper sync is another method of avoiding the HSS penalties/banding. It doesn’t pulse the flash, but just attempts to align a normal pulse with the middle of the exposure (the mid point of the shutter gap traversing the sensor), so if you did get bands they’d just be at the top and bottom. Usually works up to somewhere between 1/500s to 1/1000s, depending on your camera and flashes.
My PW never worked well in HS. RS2 from Broncolor is (surprisingly) cheaper and extremely consistent and works with any brand of lights. I'll definitely do some tests when the rumored Canon R5 comes out.
I wouldn’t hold out too much hope for the insane rumored specs of that R5/RS. All sounds a bit much to me. I’m sure it’ll be a good body, just not quite what what rumored.
I like the rumored pixel count for what I do, product photography. What ever video comes with it would be fine with me as I have so far just limited my practice to playing around. But your article is already preparing me to the, not switch, but added mirrorless format.