Colour banding

[lisadb]

Hi,

I was wonderng if anyone has any tips to reduce/prevent colour banding in skies? I work from RAW files and do the usual stuff in CS3. Upping the contrast makes the banding worse so I've started de-selecting the sky for contrast manipulation etc. Also, if it's a plain sky (no clouds) or if the photo is taken using ND grads the banding seems worse (Lee filters).

Thanks Lisa.

[Meredith]

Make sure you that files exported from your RAW converter are 16bit and that you are working in 16bit mode in PS.

[Norman]

Is this just a display problem or do prints also exhibit the phenomenon?

[lisadb]

Thanks Meredith - hadn't thought of that, I'll go check. Lisa.

[lisadb]

Hi Norman, it's more visible on the monitor but can still be seen on the print. Lisa.

[lisadb]

It's disappeared mostly in the down sizing but a bit of pink streaking can still be seen to the right of the castle.



Lisa.

[john_g]

Nice picture

[geoffL]

Yes - nice pic. A place not too far from me and a great location...!



Snap - sadly I think yours is better...!

Re the banding - I agree with making sure you're in 16 bit - it does help. Usually I have this problem most when I'm trying to 'push' the pixels too hard in PS - sometime when trying to rescue a pic that perhaps wasn't perfectly exposed in the first place or when trying to get an especially dramatic effect/change to the pic.

I have found that getting as near to where I want to be in the RAW conversion stage rather than after in PS can help a little too.

No magic answers tho - sorry!

[lisadb]

Love the sky in your pic. Think I can see the rock I usually sit on. Lisa.

[PhilW]

Can't help with the banding, but those are both very fine photographs

[Monobod]

If you take a photograph of something fairly neutral, such as a plain emulsioned wall, do you get any sign of banding then? If so, it may be a sensor problem??

Does the banding only occur in the blue sky or does it continue accross the full width of the image, passing through other objects such as the castle in your photograph?

In other words, is it a constant feature, repeatable every time?

If it only occurs randomly in blue skies, it may be polarised light affecting the colour. If so try using a circular polarising filter to see if that solves the problem.

[lisadb]

Thanks for the comments everyone. David I'll go and investigate - thanks for the info. Lisa.

[Zou]

Upping the contrast makes the banding worse

How do you increase contrast? Some methods may be better than others, so it may be worth seeing if it the result of using the simple "adjust contrast" function, which I find (in Elements) to be quite horrible. Other techniques may prevent the banding and give more natural results.

[lisadb]

I use curves usually. LDB

[Zou]

I don't have 'full' curves in PSE, but I know in GIMP whilst it can be a useful tool, you have to be very careful to not overdo it when an image is already reasonably high contrast. I'm no editing expert, but I'd say that as sky tones generally are very smoothly graduated, it would make sense to adjust their tones with caution, certainly as a selection, rather than with the whole image.

You could as an alternative try a duplicate layer, set to overlay or soft light mode (adjusting opacity so it isn't ridiculously overdone), and masking out the non-sky elements of the image. This also boosts saturation nicely.

[Malcolm_Stewart]

Just wondering if you get the same problem if you use the jpeg straight from the camera? And, does it occur with the camera manufacturer's raw converter?

[lisadb]

Oooooh - some more ideas to play with. Thank you. Lisa.