Banding

JulieLawsonPhotography

All of a sudden I'm seeing small amounts of banding. I'm not sure what happened. Maybe something messed up on my computer? My friend didn't see it on her computer, but I can Any suggestions?

pyry

Have you calibrated or changed any settings on or related to the display? What display do you use?

Banding occurs because LCDs aren't perfect in colour reproduction and correcting for it causes them to have to skip colour tones here and there. The way around this is using displays that have colour look-up tables deeper than 8-bit per channel, then the hardware can choose the right colours from a larger pool and banding goes away. These displays tend to toward the higher end of the catalogues.

However, display adapter cards always have 8-bit LUTs and using those to correct colour reproduction can cause banding on the better displays as well.

arodney

The question is, is the banding in the document or in the display?

If you make a Photoshop gradient, say from black to white, do you see banding? If so, its the display. That would indicate a profile issue or how you've calibrated the display. But the banding might be in your documents. We need to figure out which.

pathfinder

What Andrew said.

Is the banding seen in a print, or on a monitor screen only. If the prints are fine, then it is a monitor issue.

Does it change or disappear at different image sizes on your monitor screen?

JulieLawsonPhotography

pathfinder wrote:

What Andrew said.

Is the banding seen in a print, or on a monitor screen only. If the prints are fine, then it is a monitor issue.

Does it change or disappear at different image sizes on your monitor screen?

Monitor only. Like when I pull up the color palette...it is very obvious. I'm noticing with skin tones. It won't be obvious in the normal view, but if I zoom in.....again noticeable. I haven't had a chance to ask my husband if something is amiss in my monitor. I work on a laptop, just so you know. I just printed something off and it's not on my prints.

digismile

If this is just a recent thing, check your monitor settings, particularly the color quality (i.e. the number of colors that you can display). The higher the better (milliions of colors vs. thousands of colors).