What causes banding in print gradients?
Banding is when a smooth gradient prints, or shows on screen, as visible stripes or steps of color instead of a seamless blend.
What it means for your file
It comes from too few tones spread across a wide area: a long, subtle gradient in 8-bit color, a heavily compressed JPEG, or a conversion that drops steps on the way to the press. Adding a little noise to the gradient, working in 16-bit or with a wider range of tone, and saving at full quality usually hide it.
Heavy compression causes banding too: see JPEG compression.
An example
A poster with a sky fading from pale to deep blue across 24 inches has only a limited number of blue values to spread across that width, so printed large, each step can show as a band. Adding a little noise in Photoshop (Filter → Noise → Add Noise), or turning on Dither when drawing the gradient, breaks up the steps so the eye reads a smooth blend.
A common mistake
Judging a gradient only on screen. A monitor can hide banding that the press shows, or show banding that won’t print, so long, subtle gradients, especially dark ones, need checking on a printed proof. And save the image at full quality: re-saving it as a small JPEG brings the bands back.
How to fix it
If your printer sent the file back saying “The images are heavily compressed,” the fix page has the step-by-step way to do it yourself, and a fixed price if you’d rather have it done.
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