[m-Que]

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

[itsallgoode9]

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.

[JorisMX]

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)

[tom]

Make sure, this is checked.

[iker]

another solution: try to recover your old CRT monitor

[m-Que]

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

[tom]

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

[m-Que]

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.

[itsallgoode9]

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.