Meppelfield

Yes, it does. First of all, sorry for the delay in answering here. Something came up and I had to take a few days off around the weekend. I believe that I may have mislead myself a bit by reading posts on other forums saying that "you will see less banding in 16-bit" when they may well have been refering to something like a printed piece that actually is not limited in the same way a typical monitor is. I think we can close this issue, and I would like to sincerely thank you for your help. I wish you all the best

I ran what you suggested and it freed up quite a bit of space and flagged a number of issues that it fixed. I do not see any immediate effect, but I suppose it is good to keep things tidy. The files I submitted in my original post were designed that way to make the problem I'm seeing as evident as possible. It is still a problem, although less obviously so, in other scenarios. My previous files that I created had way more stuff going on, so I am not sure how comparable they would be. Funnily enough, your response was enough to make me take a slightly different approach to my fault tracing and I think I have narrowed things down a bit. I have done a majority of my previous work in 8 bit colors. For this piece I was about to start working on I knew there would be a lot of focus on skin tones, so I switched to 16 bit colors in order to enable smoother transitions and make it look realistic. As I was starting off I wanted to make my own gradient through brushing, so I started with a very dark background and wanted to gradually brighten it through brush strokes, which is when I discovered the very dark banding as I showed in my original post. I couldn't look past it as it was so disturbing to my eyes. Today I opened one of my old files that i finished some time ago, sRGB 16 bit, and tried converting it to 8 bit instead. To my surprise I couldn't see a single thing changing. I toggled between undo and redo for a while but there was no change whatsoever. I then proceeded to create gradients (using the gradient tool) from black to white in two new documents, one 8 bit and one 16 bit. The 8-bit version actually looks better, because it applies dithering which the 16-bit does not. I am not sure really what's going on at this point. For now, I will continue to work in 8-bits, because I think I can adapt so that it suits my needs. But I am still confused as to why I see no improvement from working in 16-bit. The way I understood it is that you get a way wider color range at your disposal but it will make your files larger and heavier to work with. Do you have any theory as to why I am experiencing this? Does it make sense to you at all?

Hello, I ran into a problem last night which I seem to be unable to solve regarding banding and/or posterization with soft brushes in Photoshop. It appeared seemingly out of the blue - I did not actively change anything related to drivers, my computer setup or my monitor and its calibration. When I use soft brushes I get something that looks like a map of elevation, such as those of the ocean floor. See screenshots below. It may or may not have similarities to this issue: I have switched to 16bit colors in order to attempt to fix this problem (as well as experimenting with color settings, hardware acceleration, and so on) but the problem remains. I honestly do not see much of a difference between 8 bit and 16 bit. See the brown area in particular of my attached screenshot for a view of the problem. Here is another screenshot: Do they appear smooth to you or do you see a clear banding effect? I did not have this issue previously, and I can still open old files that I created prior to the problem occuring and they look good in photoshop. I have a PC desktop running Windows 10 64bit and Photoshop 19.1.4. It is over 2 years old, and has 16GB of RAM. Its hard drive has 22GB free out of 120GB. The last time I shut down was just before posting this thread. I have never run a cleanup program. I have checked that I am running in sRGB 16bpc I have changed my firefox config to view proper colors as of another of your guides. Best regards