Maxwell Render | Official public forum

Hey guys,

I've noticed that weird thing when using Gradient Tool in Photoshop. See those vertical lines - it's like as if gradient would be sort of layered...


Any ideas what that is?

Thanks

A few possible thing:

- try doing the same gradient in a 16 bit document and see if that fixes the problem

-try turning dithering on

-could just be your monitor... monitors have a hard time displaying all of the values in a gradient sometimes and you develop banding.

i believe it's the 16 bit issue though.

Thats pretty much it.

If it still looks this way in the end I suggest adding some noise, depending on the image size I normally use a value of 1-2.
Sometimes it also helps to add noise to certain channels (RGB)

Make sure, this is checked.

another solution: try to recover your old CRT monitor

Thanks for help, guys;
Honestly, I didn't came up to what exactly caused the problem - it was just that one single image that had this strange 'step-by-step' gradient. Probably dithering wasn't turned on for some reason - I always have it on, so I just didn't notice it, don't know, really...
But I made an interesting test - used the thing as displacement map in Maxwell - as a result a I got a 'stair-looking-thing'. I guess my eyes and monitor are both fine then

So, now with dithering on, do you still have banding?

Yeah, the thing's gone for good.
The problem is I can seem to "recreate the origin" of the problem: It's not a 16bit issue, and looks like dithering doesn't seem to have effect on it ether.
I just hope it won't pop-up again at some critical point, hours before the deadline.
Thanks for help everyone.
I'll just stick to all the stuff mentioned above, to avoid it happening again.

Did you have any "Levels" or "Saturation/Hue" layers overlapping each other? I've had this introduce banding before. I think i had two levels layers on top of each other...once I switched to just one it resolved banding issues.