Did you by any chance change your monitor color display setting?
Actually, no. I haven’t changed a thing on my computer. Is there a solution to this, or a certain color setting I don’t know about? The display is set for "millions" of colors, at 1440×900 (I have a 15" MacBook Pro), and is set on Color LCD as my display profile.
Any help would be appreciated. Thank you.
The Apple portable LCD screens will show banding in gradients in MANY cases. This is a limitation of the screen, not Photoshop and often not due to your color settings. Although color settings can have a play in it as well. Simply, the portable screens do not have a "million" color depth. They have a "thousands" color depth then use dithering to display the rest of the colors. This dithering will show banding in gradients. This is one primary reason why portable computers and not the best systems for color accurate work. And this is not merely Apple machines, almost all portable computers will have this issue.
The things to do are twofold:
1: do the math. If you have a short gradient change (e.g. 20 percent to 25 percent) over a long distance (lets say 10 inches) then you will have a percentage change every 2 inches. Without a awful (literally and figuratively) lot of noise you will notice banding.
2: After doing the math (and then knowing what the distance should be for each percentage change), slowly move the dropper across (up, down, follow the gradient) and see when/if a change occurs when you see one occur on the screen.
also I’ve done some tests and my 16 bit gradients weren’t always better than my 8 bit (go figure)
alan
Also try to avoid JPG when saving. The JPG artifact will damage smooth gradients, so use tiff, binary, bitmap or png if you want to keep things really smoooooth 🙂
