One of the issues that has bugged Photoshop users for a long time is the issue of “fake banding”.
Banding will often appear in areas of your images that contain smooth gradients (for example in a sky). If you work in 8-bit mode, this banding will often be real because in 8-bit mode the number of different levels of luminosity is limited to 256, and real bands can appear when you make adjustments like blending, sharpening or clarity/dehaze adjustments. Editing in 16-bit mode should remove most instances of banding.
However, Photoshop (prior to version 23.5) will take some shortcuts when rendering your images that can often cause the appearance of “fake banding”. This is because one of the shortcuts it takes when rendering your image is to use 8-bit renders of the different layers to speed up processing and screen refreshes.
The fake banding will usually disappear if you make a stamp visible copy of your image, or if you move to 100% size or greater.
The example shown in Figure 1 shows the fake banding easily created by blending two simple gradients together and making a Levels adjustment.
Fig 1 - Fake banding example
In Photoshop CC version 23.5 (released in August 2022) Adobe have introduced a new Preference setting that will remove this “fake banding” phenomenon in most instances. The setting is called “Precise Previews for 16-bit documents” and can be found on the Technology Previews tab (meaning it is a preview of a feature still in development) – see Figure 2.
Fig 2 - Photoshop Technology Previews Preferences
If you check this setting you will also need to restart Photoshop for it to take effect.
As you can see in Figure 1, with this setting enabled, the banding has disappeared.
I would imagine that this setting forces more processing from Photoshop and therefore if your computer is not particularly fast it make cause a noticeable speed issue. On my M1 Macbook Pro I really notice no difference in speed, so if you have a fairly fast processor then I would recommend giving it a try and get rid of that annoying fake banding.
This article was first published in the October 2022 issue of Artists Down Under magazine.