Since there were some questions about banding, I thought it might be useful to do an "issue" post. Here is an image with banding. Notice in the background a series of lines where there should be a smooth grade from light to dark. Sometimes a monitor won't show this so if I suspect it is there, I'll put the image here to see if anyone else sees it. It always stinks to post something that you think looks great only to hear that there is something like this going on!!
If you have an image with banding, please add it to the thread.
If you have a pre/post fixed banding issue that would be GREAT! You can lay some wisdom on the group.
All posts and feedback welcome on this one!
Just to add, there are several steps that can prevent banding, and also steps to fix banding; fixing is much more difficult, so prevent if you can.
If you are using a program like Lightroom, make sure it exports as 16bit, even if you are "Editing in Photoshop..." right clicking. Now in photoshop (or like program) you will notice the image is using 16 BIT.. You should mostly be okay at this point, edit away. If you are going to use the image on social media, down-sample the file back to 8BIT (what nearly all social media sites sample too), and save off as a TIFF using "ZIP" Compression... This will yield the best results for social media images. Unless you are posting to FStoppers where they want a JPG or PNG (some reason they hate TIFFs).
If you have a really delicate file that still shows banding in 16 BIT, you can convert to 32 BIT and Edit... But your tools will be limited, including if you're using plugins like Luminar, or Topaz software.
Sometimes a quick fix is up-scaping an image from 16 to 32, then right back down to 16.
Once banding is "Baked" into a file, it's more difficult to remove but it is still possible. Taking the precautions above is the best route to take though, if at all possible.
How about this? It's so gross, I'm undecided about leaving it in as a graphic element in itself. It reminds me of smoked salmon, or the grain in timber. Smoked salmon in the sky. Sounds like a song title.
No great wisdom on fixes, except to go easy in ACDSee's Develop mode, and use Edit mode more. I think.
Which won't mean much to anyone anyway, as I seem to be the only person in the world using ACDSee.
Got a lot of images to fix... I have resorted to local linear blurring along an axis perpendicular to the bands, which is what is known technically as a kludge, given that it should be avoided in the first place.
This image hurts my "banding soul". :-/
You people & your "technically perfect" images! What about ART?????
;-)
I love ART, but the image above should be banned (or more accurately banneded given the subject....?)
;-)
Me too. Sorry Chris!
Philistines, both of you!
Great info. Thanks for posting!
OK, I get it now. I had a monitor from way back that would show banding on basically every image I edited, and it freaked me out. I knew what banding was, just not what it was called. The first image it really made look bad was this one. For some reason it really struggled to render the background correctly.
Doesn't look too bad to me, if I look hard I can see Moire, magenta~teal banding. There is a mask-slider to remove it in Lightroom (and prob all software).
I really need a new monitor though, this one is from 2008. :-/
I eventually got around to re-editing it, and came with an image I liked much better.
Does this have banding? I don't see it on my computer monitor but I up loaded to facebook and it looks terrible when viewed on my phone. I don't see it on my laptop though.
I do see some but it isn't "bad/horrible"; going from the darkest greens to the nearby greens.
I had an image like that just yesterday. In photoshop I changed it up to 32bit, then back to 16bit and finally back to 8bit.. Saved as TIFF (zip compression)... then when back in lightroom, "exported" as tiff with sharpness (for monitors). Facebook likes Tiffs the most it seems. The banding in my image, by doing to above, was almost gone... almost.. FB and social medias still smack around files a little... but my best results are by using the tiff format.
For reference here is the image I had issues with, very similar. uploaded as a PNG here since Fstoppers doesn't like Tiffs..
[Edit: and slight banding appeared after uploading]
Thanks Joe. I do see s light bit with it here, nowhere near as bad as Facebook. Looks worse on my phone than my laptop. I rarely do anything in Photoshop just lightroom and all I do for export is resize to 2028 on long edge, because I read that was best for facebook. Probably time I start learning more about photoshop and file types.
You can do just what your doing, but in the export try Tiff with leaving the rest how your doing. See how that goes.
I'll try that thanks.
From my experience to get rid of Banding is adding noise yes as you heard
make new layer fill with Edit >Fill > 50% Grey then change mode to soft light the go to Filter> Noise> Add Noise , you will see the change result as you increase noise amount :)