grey gradient

[meierruedi@hotmail.com]

I had to take a picture in front of a grey paper background roll altough I hate them.
And now I'm stuck with exactely the forseen problem: it should have a uniform degradée (very soft light from one side) but there are some cracks/blotches showing.
If now I'm blurring (surface blur) the background the problem seems to be solved but only until you look at 100%: banding going on.
It doesn't matter if you take gaussian blur or do it in steps, still the same result. So I tought to be extra smart and created a new file and filled it with the gradient tool. But guess what: no smooth transitions either!

Do I really have to shoot a new background to solve the problem or does anybody have a photoshop fix???

[Henrik Paul]

Are you sure that the problem is in the file, and not in e.g. the monitor's profile? If you have profiled your monitor, it could very well induce some odd color behavior in smooth gradients.

Try to make a full-screen white-to-black gradient and look if there's the same things going on there.

[Jonathan Wienke]

There's about a 90% chance that what you are seeing is a monitor artifact and not really in the image. Try printing the image and you'll likely not see the problem at all.

[brianchapman]

Do I really have to shoot a new background to solve the problem or does anybody have a photoshop fix???
[{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

Try adding some noise to the gradient (make sure you're viewing at 100%).  Usually noise added with Gaussian distribution and between 0.5 and 2.0 will smooth the gradient and will not show up in the image.  When you scale down (i.e. view at 25% instead of 100%) an image in Photoshop you may still see banding, but it will be a result of the scaling and not the actual gradient.

This may not fix the first problem you mentioned with the shot of the gray paper, but it should help with the gradient fill.

Brian
[a href=\"http://www.brianchapmanphotography.com]http://www.brianchapmanphotography.com[/url]