Photos with a black and white profile (like gray gamma 2.2.) have terrible "gradient" noise in the shade areas.

Question

I am working with scans of black and white images with black and white profiles (like Gray gamma 2.2.). Since a few days the images started to show horrible gradient noise in the darker areas. When I convert them into Srgb the problem disappear, but I need to use the b/w profiles.

I have been working for many years in this way without any problems. Suddenly this problem appeared and I don’t have a clue what has changed.

I attached a detail of one of the images. The problem is visible in many areas of the images also at 50% magnification or less .

Thank you for your help.

D Fosse · Answer

I cannot reproduce this. I’ve scrutized these two test files, and I cannot see any banding, or difference between them (they’re zoomed out just to fit in a screenshot):

We need to see your full Help > System Info from Photoshop. It could be a GPU issue, but I suspect you may have a broken monitor profile. Grayscale is color managed just like RGB, and it still needs to be converted into your monitor profile. And even though it all ends up in the same monitor profile, the conversion from the source is different, and so one may work correctly and the other not.

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