Gradient banding

PieceOfSkunk · Post by **PieceOfSkunk** » Mon Jun 04, 2007 7:35 am

It seems like no matter what I do, whenever I have gradients in my comic backgrounds, the gradients seem to separate into bands of color, rather than a smooth transition. I know this is partially due to compression, but the problem is, even high-quality JPEGs show banding, and I can even see some subtle banding in Photoshop even before I save my images. Also, the banding in the same image seems worse when it's on the Internet than when it's on my computer.

I'm sorta thinking this might be something I'll just have to work around, but if anyone has any insight, I'd appreciate it!

Nomadic Phoenix · Post by **Nomadic Phoenix** » Mon Jun 04, 2007 3:14 pm

Save it as a .png. They do gradients much better. Example is below:

The .png version.

The .jpg version.

Mind you, the difference is hard to see at this size, but if you look close, you can see that the .png version is much cleaner and nicer than the .jpg version. See, pngs can compress really nice while still retaining that awesome amount of pixels and pixel colors.

Dooky · Post by **Dooky** » Mon Jun 04, 2007 3:48 pm

A monitor with 16 bit colour or less will often display banding too, although the effect can range from obvious to barely noticeable.

C.w. · Post by **C.w.** » Mon Jun 04, 2007 4:34 pm

Do you have a cheaper lcd monitor? Sometimes they do that.

PieceOfSkunk · Post by **PieceOfSkunk** » Tue Jun 05, 2007 6:03 am

dooky wrote:A monitor with 16 bit colour or less will often display banding too, although the effect can range from obvious to barely noticeable.

That's it! My monitor was set to 16 bit color for some reason and I hadn't even noticed until now. Thanks!