Table of Content
What is Banding?
Banding in an Image or a Video means, that bands for where a smoother Gradient should be.
Why is banding happening?
Banding happens only because of a lack of information in the Image.
Simply the more colors are in the image the smoother the gradients are.
This image shows a black to white Gradient on the Left side within an 8-Bit Color space, and on the right side I reduced the colors to 16.
But the Image is actually way more interesting than it seems at first.
Because I didn’t pick the colors. Photoshop did.
And what you can see is, that the Bands are the smallest in the gray area and they getting bigger in the bright and dark areas.
This shows, that most image compressing algorithms capture more details in the medium bright areas.
fix banding after Image Export in Photoshop
Export for web
Normal Export
fix banding after Video Export out of After Effects, Premiere Pro, Media Encoder
If you have banding after Exporting a Video, the Problem is the Color depth.
In most video formats, the standard Color depth is 8-Bit. Which is enough for most of the Videos, but there are always some Videos, which can cause problems. Especially Videos with a lot of dark colors have this issue.
There are a lot of video Formats, but I only use 4 which are QuickTime, H264,H265 and WebM I don’t really see a reason, to use anything else.
When it comes to QuickTime, you can just switch in the depth menu from 16.7 Million colors to a billion colors. When it comes to QuickTime, you should pick that in general, since it is not a format meant for final output.
h264 doesn’t support more than 8-Bit, which is the reason you should switch to Hvec (h265) in this case.
Fix Banding if you got an Image with Banding in Photoshop
If you got a Photo with Banding already in it because likely someone else f*cked up you can take advantage of the fact, that banding only happened in areas of the Image with gradients.
To do that, just select either the part with the banding in it or without it. Personally, I like t use the Quick Selection Tool for something like that.
If you are Donne, Press Ctrl/command + J to Copy the selected on a new Layer
Hold Ctrl/command and click on the new Created Layer, to get the same selection again. Now select the Original Layer, Click on Select>Inverse to inverse your selection and Press Ctrl/command + J again.
Now you have the Original Layer, a Layer with the Part without banding, The Part with Banding and the Original Layer. If not, put it in this order.
Now select the Layer with the Banding and Click on Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur and set it strong enough to completely remove the banding.
After that, hit on okay.
