Need a little help with PS CS4

[Dark Knight]

Take a look at the sample gradient jpeg I have made below, my problem is all of a sudden I cannot get my gradients to come out with a smooth transition from one color to another. Does everyone else see the choppy lines in the transition colors I am seeing?

I seemed to have had this problem a while back, but I cannot seem to remember what was done to correct it and it is driving me bat sh!t, does anyone know how to correct this?

Image is 2560x1600, RGB Color 8 bit , 72 pixels per inch. I have tried increasing pixels per inch and also tried 16 and 32 bit color, both make it worse.

Running Adobe Photoshop CS4 on a Windows 7 64 bit machine, 6 gigs of ram / Pentium dual core processor 2.60 gigs each. All drivers are up to date.

[gor17981]

Did you tick the dither box in the gradient window? that sometimes works to reduce those lines.

[Dark Knight]

Dither box is checked.

[designfjotten]

i think this is a color problem, happens with black and other "non color" colors, like "white" , "gray" , "black"
try too make one in red and blue, too see if the problem is PS or if it's the color scheme :)

[Dark Knight]

Here are two more samples, one in red and another in blue, as you can see the banding is not so pronounced as in the black/grey original I posted. But it is still there and visible.

[designfjotten]

I've had this problem before myself, my experience with photoshop and gardients, suggest me make a permanent color, and put on gardient finally with layer style. it works well for me anyway. This may of course be the resolution you are designing in, what do you use, in the setup of an new file?

[Dark Knight]

Here is another red sample I made using multiple layers, first by putting down a dark base layer then I created the gradient layer.
No matter what I try I always get the same end result of banding with the black / grey gradient. This seems to be a big problem with Photoshop if you do a Google search and what alot of people suggest is using noise and blur filters to aleviate the problem. It seems the larger the graphic, the worse the problem. You would think Adobe would address the issue?

[nofx1994]

ok i did a bit of messing with this and for what i did with it was did your size resolution at 300 pixels (yes quite a big file but it happens lol) but i put up the psd if you want to look at it in photoshop and i looked at it at 100% did not see any lines really standing out

http://i44.tinypic.com/106k6yd.jpg

[Big V]

I had a similar issue awhile back and never could get it figure out. Finally i did a reset by holding down shift+crtl+alt keys before starting ps till a window pops up asking to delete current setting file. You will need to go into preference afterwards and reset any customs setting you might have set like ruler,guides,resources memory usage, etc. This will also revert all the auto saved location you have so make sure you know where all your resources are located if you are using any that are not the default location the program uses normally (I store all of my resource on a different drive. Styles, Brushes, Gradients, Etc. That way if i do have an issue or do a reformat i don't forget to save them and lose everything if this make since to you)

[Dark Knight]

Thanks for the help guys, but I am pretty sure that this is a Photoshop problem, if you do a Google search you will come up with tons of results and everyone has there own way of dealing with banding in gradients by using filters and such, which to me is nothing but a pain in the a$$, especially considering how much I laid out for this program.
You would think that with all the money people spend on this program that it should be pretty much flawless and one should be able to get a smooth gradient with the minimal of fuss no matter what color you are coming from and going to. I get better results on a black to grey gradient in a free program like Gimp than I do in an expensive program like Photoshop.

The problem only really exists with gradients that go from dark to light on large files, it is there with lighter gradients also but I do not have to do as much filtering to clean it up on light gradients. I even tried shift+ctrl+alt like BigV suggested but that does not work either. I guess I'll have to deal with it until Adobe addresses the issue ......... maybe by CS9 OR 10?

[lwarmachinel]

I know it's like putting a bandaid on a bullet wound but, have you tried adding a couple of blur filters to your gradients?

[Swirlman1]

Everyone has presented great suggestions. Mine is to had a gradient overlay to the existent gradient in the blending options, then tweak the opacity as needed to get the desired result. I'm using CS6 so I don't know how this would look in CS4.

[lwarmachinel]

Everyone has presented great suggestions. Mine is to had a gradient overlay to the existent gradient in the blending options, then tweak the opacity as needed to get the desired result. I'm using CS6 so I don't know how this would look in CS4.

That's a good idea, Swirlman.

[Swirlman1]

That's a good idea, Swirlman.


Thank you.