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.
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.
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.
I have R5 and R5ii and with the R5ii i can shoot a lot more without banding and leds because it has almost 3 times the readout speed of the R5. Yet, when I need higher shutter, I will turn on mechanical.
Buy the new Sony A9 iii and you will never have to worry about banding every again and use electronic shutter forever
Correct, the a9 iii has the new global shutter that is unaffected by this. The whole sensor is read in one go.
Note, however, that this is a 24 MP sensor. It'll probably take a while before they get to the 60 MP r-series sensors. But eventually this will most likely be mainstream.
The Sony A9III is the only cure so far. Using mechanincal shutter and slow shutter speed may reduce the effect, but only global shutter will eliminate it.
Sure, respectfully I hear you about buying different cameras. That is not the point of my post. It is too late, photos have been taken. I would love to see a lightroom a.i. feature, or some sort of guidance as to how I can fix it in the post-process.
Understood, and I agree. This would be a much better use of AI than the generative toys.
Just injecting a dose of reality. It doesn't exist now, and there's no easy way to fix it. I've done a few, and it's easily a day's work if you want it to look good. It's more difficult than you might think.
@D Fosse I have quite a few hundreds if not thousands of concert photos shot with mechanical shutter and in need of "debanding". So no, mechanical shutter is not the solution. It may help if you use slow shutter speeds (<1/100s) but that is not always desirable.
And if you have stage smoke combined with the LEDs it makes the problem ten times worse.
An AI tool to do this would be a dream, but in the meantime I got myself the perfect concert camera - with no mechanical shutter.
In that case it has always been a problem, from film-based analog cameras through DSLRs to modern mirrorless. A mechanical shutter works the same way. Even my old Nikon F3 used a slit in the shutter curtains at high speeds.
The difference, of course, is that now you have the ability to push ISO to extremes, past 100 000, allowing you to use shutter speeds in dim indoor light that were previously unheard of.
Plus, of course, that LED technology is fairly newish.
The point is still the same. In practical terms, "scanning" shutters pose a special problem that you don't have with mechanical/traditional shutters.
An extra complicating factor is that the multiple LED lights on a stage may (will) be flickering at different frequencies making it very hard for the anti flicker function in the camera to do its job in a real life situation.
(And also the global shutter Sony A9III has a anti flicker function - to avoid reading the sensor when the light is off.)
OK, OK <hands in the air> 😉 I accept that it's possible to get banding with the mechanical shutter under very special circumstances.
I have never, ever, seen it with my Sonys - and I'm not a casual photographer. This is my job, I can do hundreds of frames in a day, many of them concert settings or other low-light events (which mostly means LED nowadays). That said, I never go above ISO 6400 and always use as slow shutter speeds as possible., just on principle.
I have seen a lot of banding with the silent shutter, which goes away when I switch to mechanical. So I will still maintain that it solves the problem, 99.99% of the time. That's not bad odds.
Oh, BTW, Sony claims improved anti-flicker with every new model, but I have used a7r ii, iii, iv and v, and haven't noticed much difference. Maybe marginally better, but nothing really substantial.
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