Luminous Landscape Forum

Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Adobe Lightroom Q&A => Topic started by: kdern on September 22, 2013, 08:55:57 pm

Title: Severe banding in Lightroom 4 (Mac)
Post by: kdern on September 22, 2013, 08:55:57 pm

I am seeing severe banding in dark sky areas when viewing and editing photos in Lightroom 4 on my Macbook Air. It's always visible in the library module, and usually in the develop module as well. Not always. It appears when I export sometimes, not always.

Any ideas on how to fix this?

(http://i.imgur.com/NEvlnlf.png)

Title: Re: Severe banding in Lightroom 4 (Mac)
Post by: Glenn NK on September 23, 2013, 01:50:28 am

My guess is that it's posterization; at least it sure looks like it.

http://www.ronbigelow.com/articles/posterization/posterization.htm

http://photonaturalist.net/3-ways-to-prevent-posterization/

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/posterization.htm

Glenn

Title: Re: Severe banding in Lightroom 4 (Mac)
Post by: mac_paolo on September 23, 2013, 07:06:18 am

Develop should present the shot in it's full glory, so posterization in Develop module could mean a severely compressed image or issue with the display profile.
Library previews are compressed JPGs, so if you set a lower quality for previews you may encounter posterization effects.

Title: Re: Severe banding in Lightroom 4 (Mac)
Post by: digitaldog on September 23, 2013, 10:07:32 am

The question is, is this banding a result of the display or in the document? I suspect the later if you're dealing with raw data. That's an issue with poor(er) quality display systems that don't produce anything close to 8-bits per color let alone more than that. Always examine this in Develop at 1:1 or greater too. You can't properly evaluate this kind of data quality in the other modules, they use a different preview quality and architecture.

Title: Re: Severe banding in Lightroom 4 (Mac)
Post by: JRSmit on September 23, 2013, 11:20:50 am

The few times i experienced such banding in LR was always the display the cause. In one case when also having the option to display the image on an iPad coming from a macbook (Airdisplay or something like that), in another case due to a bad display profile.