Gradient Problem

[Guest]

Hey there, I have the following problem:

If I want to blur an image or create a color gradient in general, the whole gradients look like steps.

Can this be softened?

I put the original image as a smart object and then a Gaussian blur over it so that I automatically have the background matching the image.

But unfortunately the gradients are not nice at all, how can I change that?

Thanks for your help.

[davescm]

Hi

You can such avoid banding by working in 16 bits/channel.
If your output then has to be 8 bit and you can again see any bands then adding a little noise can help cover it.

Note: You may still see banding on screen even when working in 16 bits/channel mode as most displays still work in 8 bit. You can use the eydropper and info panel to check whether the bands are in the document or just in the display system.
Also make sure you view at 100% zoom as even 16 bit docs are composited in 8 bit fro screen previews at less than 66.7% zoom.

Dave