Also, I've tried both on native screen and external screen. The gradient tool has been acting strange anyway, where sliding the midpoint didn't do anything for example.
Could you please post a screenshot of the Gradient on white taken at View > 100% with the pertinent Panels (Toolbar, Layers, Channels, Options Bar, …) visible?
If you create a gradient in 16 bit then any banding you see is in your display chain, not the image. Most screens are 8 bit and some are actually 6 bit + dither. The exception is a higher end 10 bit/channel monitor with a GPU card that supports it.
Note though that there is a long standing artifact when previewing a gradient, even 16 bit, to transparency against the checkerboard pattern. The smooth gradient breaks up. Again though, this is just an on screen artifact relating to the preview and is not stored in the image. Put a temporary solid white layer at the bottom of your layer stack and you should see that break up disappear, showing that the true gradient to transparency is smooth.
Ok thanks a lot. It's just hard to believe I haven't noticed this before. Also, the exported image still has some breaking up. But I suppose it's just one of those things then.
Masks aren't 8 bit, but selections are. A mask has the same bit depth as the document. Painting and gradients in a mask are always full bit depth.
You may need to watch this for masks made from selections, such as a standard luminance mask. The safe way to do this is to copy a full layer into the mask. A bit cumbersome, but can be actioned.
OTOH, I've never noticed any banding from a standard ctrl+alt+2 luminance mask. It would take an absolutely extreme adjustment to get banding from that, and in that case the file probably has deeper problems.
Funny enough I did not see any banding when I opened it in Photoshop but I did see terrible banding in the dropbox preview.
Forget Dropbox, what matters is Photoshop or other applications that fully support a high-bit display path. The application (OS, video card, display) ALL play a role.
So export this and view wherever you viewed the images you reported; do you see banding at 100%?
Author “Color Management for Photographers" & "Photoshop CC Color Management/pluralsight"
Thanks all for replying. 16 bit helped just a bit, I'm still getting banding in Illustrator and it's still not like I'm used to but I'm starting question my entire existence atm cause maybe it was always like this and I was living a lie, idk. It's mainly with dark gradients when using transparancy. It just makes a black band, then a very steep gradient of bands, not "gradual" at all as you can see in the linked image.
I hope this helps neil barstow, colourmanagement net :: adobe forum volunteer:: co-author: 'getting colour right' google me "neil barstow colourmanagement" for lots of free articles on colour management
21
Replies
AdChoices
