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K
Katsuri
Participant
February 7, 2018
Question

The Smudge Tool is creating banding within my painted image

  • February 7, 2018
  • 1 reply
  • 1519 views

Hello there,

I'm currently trying to paint another picture with Adobe Photoshop CC. Unfortunately, as of the past few days, I have noticed that banding will begin to occur when I try to smudge colors. I've tried adding noise to lessen the effect, I've tried blurring the layer and I've tried switching my color space from sRGB to US. Web Coated(SWOP) v2.

I'm working with a GTX 1070 Nvidia graphics card and have 16GB of memory. I've tried updating photoshop, I've tried updating windows and photoshop and all of my drivers. I have even tried rolling back a recent windows update. Unfortunately, I'm still getting this problem. Below is a link to the picture that I'm working on. I've upped the contrast so that it is possible to see the banding that I'm talking about. The original document is 10x15 inches, with 300 px per inch. I'm working with my CMYK color mode set at 16 bits.

here.png - Google Drive

Any help would be much appreciated!

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

Trevor.Dennis
Community Expert
Trevor.DennisCommunity Expert
Community Expert
February 7, 2018

Displaying here.png

I wouldn't work in CMYK at the sort of stage when needing to use the Smudge tool. 

What brush preset are you using?

What direction are you dragging the pixels?  Dragging darker pixels towards lighter pixels is going to produce 'apparent' banding.  Dragging back the other way should fix it though.

The smudge tool is an incredibly useful tool for illustrations.  I use it constantly, and usually with a fully soft round brush.  If I need to be subtle then I set opacity or strength jitter to pen pressure.

There are some smudge tool presets among the Kyle Webster sets added with CC2018, but I wouldn't say they work like magic.

    K
    KatsuriAuthor
    Participant
    February 7, 2018

    I switched over to CMYK to see if it would help alleviate the problem, but I am still working in RGB. This problem occurs with all of my brushes and happens when I drag the lighter pixels towards darker pixels and vice versa. The soft round brush is the only one that can get away with smudging lighter colors, but the darker the color is, the worse the effect.

    Honestly, the fact that this problem only just started occurring recently is making me post this. Smudging worked fine for me back in December. Six days ago, I painted something that should have clued me into something being wrong, but today, working on a character with dark blue skin just confirmed that quiet worry I had.

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