gradients are not smooth, free of streaks/bands

[Gallucci Art]

Illustrator will not create a clean enough gradient, as in a sky, or background, large area, without printing with horizontal lines. It cannot produce perfectly smooth gradients???

what's up with that?

It's not the printer, I was told to use photoshop, but that doesn't allow for the control illustrator has with color and adjustments.

[MBorowiec]

In which color space do You designing?

Do You know that, for example, the CMYK color gamute is much tighter than RGB? In Your gradients  may be middtones, which is not present in color space.

[Gallucci Art]

I do use cmyk and only 2-3 different colors in one gradient.

[MBorowiec]

It really dosent matter how many colors You are blending, just the color space may not have in it midtones, as I said before.

[Remo33104771ms3l]

I have exactly that same question, still Illustrator shows the gradiant as scaled, working on 5 pantone color art print, printed in offset

[Shadi_Shwiyat1619]

Or you can just go to Figma and leave illustrator where it belongs, in the garbage. It is the worst design software I have ever used. You need a phd in Adobe products to do the simplist of tasks. People have told me everything under the sun about how to fix banding. The most common answer I get is that my color values are "too close". Yet in Figma, no matter what values I use, how offset the colors are on the color wheel, I always get perfectly smooth gradients every time. No wizardry you have to do with grain or noise just to try and smooth ugly bands, just smooth as butter with no extra effort. Also Figma uses normal windows keybinds so you don't have to re learn all these stupid binds. And best of all? ITS FREE. YOU DONT have to pay an arm and a leg for a dog water software. The people using this are the same people who are stuck in Apple's ecosystem and don't understand how much simpler things could be. Adobe is a horrible company with worse software and even worse billing structure. 

[Razhiell]

Or you can produce a productive solution, instead of coming to the adobe comunity to bash adobe products. Figma is comparable to adobe xd, not to illustrator. It might be ARGUABLY better than adobe xd, since they're both tailored for UI/UX and web design. Illustrator is tailored for vector graphics, and figma has about 1% of illustrators capabilities in that regard. Switching to figma just because of gradients is hardly a reason at all. Your personal experience is your own, so if it's not for you, it's not for you. But personally, after over 20 years working as a designer, with a variety of programs, from corel draw to affinity designer and a smattering of others, illustrator is by far the best OVERALLfor VECTOR GRAPHICS. Are there features in other programs that i would love to have in illustrator? Absolutely. Are they deal breaking and enough to make me switch to another program? Not in the slightest.

[Sheena Kaul]

Moving to Adobe Color [themes]​

[Moderator - moving to Illustrator forum instead]

[NB, colourmanagement]

Hi Sheena,

I looked there in colour themes and could not see jamesg's post. Even with searching "gradations".

Anyhoo, I think it IS a colour management issue perhaps.

thanks

neil barstow, colourmanagement.net

[NB, colourmanagement]

Hi jamesg,

If you are seeing gradations with steps on screen (rather than in print) it could be your display screen profile and calibration that’s causing the issue. However if they really are horizontal lines (across the paper width) then it's likely a printer issue. Try rotating the image - does the issue rotate with it?

If the printer is definitely OK then it could be a screen issue - I am guessing you're using an LCD (flat screen) type and not an Eizo Coloredge or NEC Spectraview display? The Coloredge and Spectraview have a hardware calibration that stops this happening.

When calibrating and profiling "Normal" the software creates a calibration look up table (LUT) which is loaded into the computer video card, the screen is then profiled. What this means is that on the way to the display the data making up an image can undergo some pretty significant corrections (like a set of curves). This can cause "contouring" or "posterisation" (where there are not enough steps of digital detail to provide a fully smooth gradation). It's not usually dead straight lines, those are usually "banding" caused by a printer head fault.

So, in short the faults you see may not be in the file you've made, just a fault in the display system. Because frustration with this symptom in pre-press and design, Eizo & NEC came up with "hardware calibration" to solve it. They had to, because high end users were refusing to switch from CRT screens (which, generally, did not have the problem).

There is a workaround, I'll explain how to do it on a Mac. Go to system preferences / displays / color and rather than selecting a display profile, try selecting the sRGB profile, now click back into Illustrator. Does this solve the gradation problem? 

It's not going to give you good colour management, for that you must have an accurate display screen profile, but it will dump the calibration LUT so you can see your file shown without it's effect. Because you need the colour management to be active don't forget to switch back to the display profile.

I hope this helps

if so, please do mark my reply as "helpful" and if you're OK now, please mark it as "correct answer" so others who have similar issues can see the solution

thanks

neil barstow, colourmanagement.net

[Printrix]

The banding effect has several origins:

Monitor:

The main reason why you see banding on your monitor is because you use a software calibration. Software calibration uses the LUT-tables of your videocard. LUT-tables are prone to rounding errors, bad measurements and linearity issues caused by the software. Therefore it's better to use hardware calibration available in Eizo monitors with integrated calibration device. Even the best software calibration (e.g. SpectraCal, ArgyllCMS/DisplayCal)can't compete with the Eizo hardware calibration in my experience. Word of advice: just buy an Eizo CG series monitor.

RGB vs CMYK gradients:

When you're working in CMYK color space you're working with a synthetic device profile. CMYK profiles such as Swop or Fogra39 are characterizations of offset presses. Even though a great effort has been put into the construction of these profiles they are not linear. Also sRGB and Adobe RGB1998 are actually representations of average monitor color spaces but they are linear. In short when you create gradients and want them to be very linear you should work in RGB color space. In my experience the best working space profile for gradients in ECI-RGB v2 freely available on the website of eci.org. For most practices Adobe RGB and sRGB are more than good enough.

Photoshop/Illustrator:

If you want smooth gradients in Photoshop you should use 16-bit color mode instead of 8-bit. 8-bit color mode has only 256 shades of RGB channels and 100 of CMYK channels. Photoshop 16-bit color mode provides 32768 shades for both. In Illustrator gradients span between control points, so for each control point you will have a specific color and the colors in between are rendered. The smoothness depends on the software that renders the gradients (Illustrator or your RIP-software). Also I believe the previews screens of Illustrator and Photoshop are in 8-bit mode to increase performance, you probably need an extremely powerful and expensive system to run 16-bit previews live.

Printer:

Depending on the printer technology used you will get more or less banding effects. Traditional offset and flexo printing technology should be quite linear. Digital printing and proofing is another matter because linearizations and ICC-profiles are used (like monitor software calibration). I'm a consultant specialized in digital printer calibration for sign, textile and industrial applications. Most printer calibrations are made in 2-3 hours while I usually spend around 6-12 hours to create high quality calibrations. The extra time is mainly spent in measuring the calibration targets (linearization and ICC) many times over and averaging them. This allows to compensate fluctuations of color measurements due to instability of print media, printheads and the measuring devices (spectrophotometer).

Color conversions:

Conversions between different color profiles can also lead to banding effects especially because of rendering intents used. The rendering intents are are algorithms used to compensate for differences in color gamut between different profiles.These rendering intents often amplify non-linearities of the ICC-profiles especially when the CMY channels are not grey neutralized before ICC-profiling. All these problems could be solved if the colorants of the inks could be chosen to match specific coordinates, but unfortunately this is not the case for many reasons.

[Jeff Witchel, ACI]

Banding in Gradients has to do with the limitations of printing. Check out the following from the manual: Printing gradients, meshes, and color blends in Illustrator

[chris5C14]

why are you saying the problem is in printing? Most assets are now produced for on-screen digital where there is no printer involved. Let's be clear, Adobe is just not putting the resources into fixing fundamental design considerations and solving real problems.

[Monika Gause]

"why are you saying the problem is in printing?"

Did you even read the initial question? It is about printing gradients.

As for banding in digital images: that is where I first encountered the problem of banding 25 years ago when monitors could only display 256 colors at once. You could probably solve it with 16 bit images. The thing is that those would be larger, which is most certainly an issue on the web.

So maybe you (as the designer) want to take all those limitations into account when designing a piece (yes this is possible).

[barryg11163824]

does anyone on this site even know what they are talking about!!!!  Alot of bad advice.

[chris5C14]

I don't think many do. Even one person commented that we shouldn't blame Adobe. It can't fix its basics but it sure got moving when Ai came along. I've been fighting with Adobe and gradients for over 25 years and it hasn't addressed it at all.

[abuse removed by moderator]

[Bobby Henderson]

The person who started this discussion thread (in 2017) was talking about printing gradients. Someone else dug up this old thread recently to promote Figma.

Are you having trouble printing smooth gradients? If so, what kind of print setup do you have?

Many color printers, even quite a few expensive office color laser printers, have a lot of difficulty handling PDF-based content. That includes vector-based artwork from Adobe Illustrator. If the printer doesn't have an Adobe-certified PDF print engine in its firmware or external software running the printer then all sorts of annoying technical problems can happen. Banding in gradients is one such issue. Yucky Discolored Box Syndrome around objects with clipping masks/groups is another common problem. Depending on the printer model some effects, such as free-form gradients might not even print at all.

I see this in my workplace on a frequent basis. We have a Sharp office color laser printer/copier. It has all kinds of great whiz-bang features. But it sucks at printing Adobe artwork because it lacks that Adobe PDF engine and has to interpolate the data instead. Our large format printers and the RIP applications that run them prints Adobe artwork perfectly. The difference is that Adobe PDF print engine. The only times we're seeing banding in gradients is if a print head is going out of alignment (or needs to be replaced) or the printer just needs to be cleaned.

Sometimes it's possible to get better results printing Illustrator artwork using Adobe Acrobat rather than printing directly from Illustrator.

[Razhiell]

Voicing out against a poor comparison, bad promo and misinformation is hardly saying we shouldn't blame Adobe for their own products. Choosing Adobe products over alternatives is not the same as not wanting improvements.

As I said before, every program is tailored to what it's tailored to. Illustrator's "visual banding" doesn't appear when it's actually printed. If you're using it to print, then print out a test sheet and see how it's coming out. I save as a pdf before printing, as a feel it gives me better print results in general. And gradients always print smooth, on all 3 printers i use.

[Bobby Henderson]

I'm not aware of any large format printing RIP applications that will load Illustrator .AI files into the print queue. I know this is the case for Onyx and Raster Link Pro. A professional RIP application (that has an Adobe certified PDF Print Engine) shouldn't have any technical problems handling PDF files generated by Illustrator. Banding issues with gradients in large format output would point at hardware issues I mentioned earlier.

Consumer/office printers are not as adept at outputting artwork from Illustrator for the reasons mentioned earlier.

Visible banding in gradients on a computer screen can be caused by hardware limitations with the computer monitor and/or graphics board. They can also be caused by settings in the artwork itself.

For instance, a grayscale gradient that uses only black ink is more likely to display banding on screen and in print than a grayscale gradient that uses all four CMYK inks. Plus a CMYK "rich black" is going to print deeper than a 100% K black. I also don't like gradients that transition from a mixed CMYK color to a plain 100% K black color. Banding can happen there too. Another one that causes issues is mixing different Pantone spot colors into a gradient fill. It's a really bad idea if any transparency settings are involved.

[Park Street Printers]

We've found that getting a good CMYK gradient on our Xerox machines (certified PDF print engine rips) is fine with vector content, so long as we don't have any CMYK to 100% K, as stated by @Bobby Henderson . When printing to our Canon Pro 4000 or HP Latex 360, the banding appears quite obvious. Using either a pure raster file (tif, in our case) avoids this error, as the non-postscript rips aren't trying to interpret vector data. The HP won't even successfully rip most pdfs if they have any vector content. I use psd files with vector type for some jobs on the Canon without issues, just so long as the type is solid. I wish that our large format machines could correctly handle vector graphics in pdfs in all instances, especially the HP, which is run by an Onyx rip. My coworker had a nasty problem with a customer file today that necessitated flattening and converting a pdf to a tif in order to get rid of banding on the Canon. Same color space, same device profile.

[Bobby Henderson]

We use Onyx Thrive to run 3 HP Latex model printers in my workplace (two 360 models and one 700W). I'm not seeing any issues with them printing gradients in vector-based content. That is as long as the printers are working properly. Some issues are easy to fix on our own while others require a service tech to visit.

[Park Street Printers]

We haven't been able to update the 360 or the rip since 2019. The errors are quite entertaining. I try to update the 360 via the internet, it says it needs to be running a more recent version to do so, and to load from a usb drive. I try to load from a usb drive, and it says that it needs to be updated via the internet... The rip is a wretched Core 2 duo with 4GB of ram that sometimes resets the bios (I changed the cmos battery, it isn't the issue) and loses the boot drive. And it crashes. I asked the service people back in 2020 if I could replace it with my spare Threadripper 2950x system with 128GB of ram and 4TB of nvme storage, and they pretty much laughed at me. It's a Poster Shop RIP Queue from 2013.

[Bobby Henderson]

We bought our printers from Graphics Solutions Group and used them for doing service work on the printers that we couldn't handle ourselves. We were able to use our own choice of computer to do the RIP operations (a Dell XPS system with a Core i7 CPU and 32GB of RAM). I don't like it that GSG got acquired by Grimco.

If the service provider supplied you a PC to perform RIP functions and it came with only 4GB of RAM then they really stink. 4GB of RAM is barely enough for the Windows OS, much less anything else.

We've been able to run firmware updates on our printers without any problem. But the 360 models are getting "long in the tooth." It's only a matter of time before we have to start replacing them one by one.

I like our 700W printer for its added capabilities (including the ability to print white ink). But the thing makes all sorts of annoying noise from time to time as it automatically does minor maintenance tasks. I have to listen to music on headphones to drown out the knocks, bangs and whirr noises it does for around 20 minutes straight.

[Park Street Printers]

Our 360 was indeed sold to us by Grimco. Their support has been utterly abysmal. I contacted them again about the rip, and they said they'll drop all support for us if I replace it - even support for just the 360. They also won't even try to fix the firmware issues, saying it has something to do with the network (which is fine for updating our Canon and other HP large formats) or is due to something we did to screw up the 360. We're looking at getting a new latex printer, and I have flat out told them we won't be using Grimco, regardless of how hard it is to find another vendor/support company.

[Bobby Henderson]

We order a lot of products and materials from Reece Supply. We'll order some items from Grimco if we can't get the same things elsewhere.