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Chaca
Chaca
Participating Frequently
December 26, 2020
Question

PS banding on MONITOR but not in lightroom.

  • December 26, 2020
  • 1 reply
  • 857 views

Hey,

 

Cant find the solution anywhere! PLEASE help.

 

Never have had this problem before. I do astrophotography and use deep sky tracker to stack multiple images together to form one big .tif file.

When viewing it in ligthroom looks fine. When opening in photoshop I get weird onion banding rings that disappear when zoomed in. I have tried turning off GPU with no help. I have updated the graphics card drivers and photoshop too but nothing is working.

Like I said before this is all new. Is there a setting that im not noticing that is making the problem? Why does it show up in PS and not in LR? Also if I open the image in Camera Raw in PS it goes away.

 

Photos are of the banding zoomed out(1). Zoomed in(2). banding disappears after one more zoom in click (3)

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1 reply

D Fosse
Community Expert
D FosseCommunity Expert
Community Expert
December 26, 2020

Could you please make actual screenshots and post those, instead of photographing the screen? It's impossible to get a realistic impression here.

 

Are these files 8 bit or 16 bit? What file format - specifically, are they jpegs?

 

General remarks:

If you're working in 16 bit depth, any banding you see is in your display system. The display pipeline works in 8 bit depth, most laptop and gaming displays are even 6 bit plus dithering. In an 8 bit system, you have only 256 discrete steps per channel.

 

Jpeg compression often adds banding on its own, quite aside from being 8 bit. The color component is more aggressively compressed than the luminance component.

 

The big problem with banding is that it's cumulative. In an 8-bit chain, several components may introduce a little banding on their own, each nothing too obvious, but they layer on top of each other and pile up. The end result can sometimes be quite ugly. So then you can have a long chain: 8 bit data > jpeg compression > monitor profile > video card/driver > calibration tables (if any) > display panel.

 

What's absolutely certain, is that a 16 bit file does not inherently have any banding whatsoever. There's 32 768 individual steps per channel.

 

Oh - you normally see a lot less banding in Lightroom compared to Photoshop, because Lightroom uses dithering on the output data. Photoshop doesn't.

 

---

 

All that said: If this really is as bad as it seems here, I would suspect either a buggy video driver, or a defective monitor profile from your monitor/laptop manufacturer.

 

 

Chaca
ChacaAuthor
Participating Frequently
December 29, 2020

Sorry for the late reply.

 

They are .tif files

They are 32 bit which I turn down to 16bit in PS.

 

I am zoomed in 62.08% on this next image.

This image is 67.73% zoomed in. As you can see all banding is gone.

 

Some things I noticed. I merge the layers the problem lessens. In camera RAW in PS there is no problem. If I Shift+ctrl+Alt+E and creat a new image with all edits the problem goes away. As shown here:

 

My monitor is an 8 bit. Is there a setting I can change in PS or windows that would fix this problem? Its nearly impossible to edit photos with fake banding showing up on my monitor. I have edited photos like these before and never had a problem with ghost banding.

I also have done a color calibration with a spyder 5 and its has the same problem. And all GPU drivers are up to date as well. I have also turned off GPU in PS but that didn't help either.

Thanks sooooo much for your help!!!!

Chaca
ChacaAuthor
Participating Frequently
December 29, 2020

One more thing: I notice your histogram is full of gaps. It shouldn't be unless you have a very steep curve applied, in combination with a selection-based mask. Selections are always 8 bit even in a 16 bit file (legacy code I assume).

 

Try to refresh the histogram by clicking the triangle. If the gaps are still there, it's in the data.


I think this is what you mean. 

I changed it to Adobe RGB with the convert to proflie as pictured above. It changed very little when adding the curves levels. And yes I do add a very steep curves level. This is my normal workflow with astro photos because of how faint the images are. This is also the same steps that many Youtubers use in their workflow but non seem to have this problem and this problem is new within the past 3 weeks or so.

Here is the histogram before and after I click on the triangle.

after.

and here is the same image saved as a JPG.

 

 

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