Luminous Landscape Forum
Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Printing: Printers, Papers and Inks => Topic started by: William Walker on March 06, 2026, 04:03:56 am
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I am sure we have all seen or heard of people having problems with banding on their prints at some point or another.
Most advice, when people ask about banding, revolves around changing settings on the printer, I don’t recall anyone ever talking about the file quality and banding.
I created a 16-Bit image and then made a JPEG of the same file. I then put the text on the JPEG and saved it again, so it is really not a great file anymore.
Importantly, the banding is not readily noticeable on my NEC PA272W display…
I then printed the 16-Bit and 8 Bit files together and the difference is easily noticeable.
I can’t remember where I got the two colour images demonstrating the difference between 8 Bit and 16 Bit, but that is what prompted me to do this test.
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The difference between 8 bit and 16 bit on your printer is the number of bits in a single color channel. So it's really closer to 24 bits vs 48 bits overall. That color example you are showing is showing the difference between 16 bits and 8 bits total across all colors. The 8 bit example is actually a 256 color image which hasn't really been a thing since we were using GIFs instead of PNGs for non-photo data on the web.
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I think this is pretty widely known among those with time in photography, imaging, etc... Don't downsample images unless/until you absolutely have to.
(But it's def not known among general public sending files to print services etc, and who usually lack the tools/apps to do otherwise anyway.)
So I think it might not be mentioned often here because most will assume that people in these circles aren't using low-qual files, especially with wide format printers.
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8 good bits per channel is all a printer needs. Editing existing 8-bit to a degree can introduced banding.
digitaldog.net/files/TheHighBitdepthDebate.pdf
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8 good bits per channel is all a printer needs. Editing existing 8-bit to a degree can introduced banding.
digitaldog.net/files/TheHighBitdepthDebate.pdf
A good read. Altho tech has progressed (and maybe regressed lol), all the bit-depth fundamentals remain sound.
Continuing from that article's conclusion, and for the OP, for me it's an easy decision: anytime I'm offered a choice in my devices/apps to discard some data, I say no. In my use there's rarely any meaningful benefit or "economy" to discarding data, while the risk of encountering issues goes up. Plus tech advances can reveal the shortcomings of past decisions when returning to earlier works.
So like many things, bit depth was one of those "set-it-and-forget-it" choices I applied to my workflow years ago and haven't thought too much about it since. This thread is a nice reminder though to check these things once in a while..., especially after software updates etc to verify things are still set as we want them.
So I don't downsample before sending files to my HP Z3100/3200 printers. HP says the print driver downsamples to 8 bits per channel, so I've preserved the most data in my files until that conversion is necessary. (Ok technically I can submit 16-bit images to the printer by bypassing the driver, but the printer firmware will still downsample to 8 bits anyway..., tho curiously HP suggests that firmware conversion can be better than the print driver's conversion, a diminishing returns rabbit hole I've never bothered going down...)
Speaking of printers tho, what's the story with more recent printers? (Mine are 20-yr old tech.) Do any of them process in higher bit depths now and give meaningful advantage from it?
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Not super recent but still pertaining to print drivers.
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/2uw6co0yb81l4uhhuxi8z/The-Right-Print-Resolution.pdf?rlkey=w9ncq43ltjffcn9karpq0c41x&dl=0
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8 good bits per channel is all a printer needs. Editing existing 8-bit to a degree can introduced banding.
digitaldog.net/files/TheHighBitdepthDebate.pdf
I agree if your file is in sRGB or Adobe RGB. ProPhoto RGB is a large enough color space that I think 8 bits per channel isn't sufficient to avoid banding in smooth gradients with low noise images. Or you can add some noise.
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Not super recent but still pertaining to print drivers.
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/2uw6co0yb81l4uhhuxi8z/The-Right-Print-Resolution.pdf?rlkey=w9ncq43ltjffcn9karpq0c41x&dl=0
Some interesting results on print file resolution there... It's been so long I can't recall if I tried that before. Gonna give it a test sometime!
Also a good reminder for me to explore LR printing again..., way back I used it but at some point I started printing from PS instead and honestly can't recall why anymore lol
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I agree if your file is in sRGB or Adobe RGB. ProPhoto RGB is a large enough color space that I think 8 bits per channel isn't sufficient to avoid banding in smooth gradients with low noise images. Or you can add some noise.
Try and let us know (I have):
http://www.digitaldog.net/files/Gamut_Test_File_Flat.tif
Or:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/svz5pt6o1wa2s2l/Gamut_Test_File_Flat.tif?dl=0