P: Remove LED banding

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
July 23, 2023
14 replies
2453 views

Hi! 🙂
Banding caused by LED light during concerts is a big problem in the concert industry. A fix would be much appreciated!
Millions of concert photographers suffers from this kind of banding, even if their cameras have anti-banding. Would be great for the music community if Lightroom could overcome this problem.

Best regards,
Klaus

Show previous replies

C

chrisw14580

Participant

I have a suggestion for an A.I. feature that would benefit a ton of mirrorless camera photographers. I recently made a mistake with my Sony camera which caused banding across a lot of the photos (left on silent shutter mixed with l.e.d. lighting). I would love to say I could retake them however this was an extremely important event and I am sort of in hot water here. I could see a banding a.i. fix tool as a huge help to the community. I did a lot of research as to solutions in photoshop and lightroom and they take far too much work to hardly fix this issue. People in some of the posts are dating back to 2018. There is still no solution is what I keep hearing.

I could see this as an A.i. feature that could detect all of the black line shadows that the camera placed on my photos as being a huge help. I placed a photo of what I am talking about as a reference for this post.

D Fosse

Community Expert

No what? Using the mechanical shutter is currently the only way to avoid the whole issue.

I fully agree it can be a big problem. Rock concerts is one thing, nobody minds a barrage of shutter clicks there, but it's a whole other story with low-key acoustic events with a small audience. That's where you really need the silent e-shutter.

The reason it happens is that the sensor is scanned line by line, at varying rates corresponding to shutter speeds. When the scan rate interferes with the rapid flickering of LED lights, turning itself off and on completely, you get these stripes in the image. It also causes the rolling shutter effect in video.

Until some camera manufacturer comes up with a way to read the whole sensor at once, or at least many orders of magnitude faster than now and perhaps in several consecutive runs, this is going to continue to be a problem.

You can usually minimize the problem by finding a safe range of shutter speeds/ISO settings. That requires some time and experimenting in advance.

Correcting it later, in processing, can be extremely difficult. The striping is a lot more complex than it appears, in terms of contrast curves and transfer functions. I've had to deal with a few of these, and it's incredibly time-consuming. There's no way to do it in Lightroom. To have any hope, you need to do it in Photoshop.

And now I'm finally getting to the point: I think this would be a prime candidate for AI. This is where AI could really do some useful work. So it's a very valid and very relevant feature request - but don't expect any quick fixes. Unless it's already being worked on.

So yes, add votes to this. But don't forget the wider context, it's not a trivial problem.