Topic awaiting preservation: eliminate banding in gifs or jpgs

Ok, I am trying to create a gradient fill and in photoshop it looks fine. When I go to save as or save for web as gif or png or jpg, there is serious banding. Is this avoidable?


www.visualsun.ws

GIF format supports up to 256 colors only...

JPG and PNG should be fine though... unless your monitor is set on something low like 16bit or 256 or you're saving in a highly compressed format. Try File>Save For Web

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Those are two of the key things ^

1) check that your monitor's color depth is24 or 32 bit. I don't recall the reasons, but with 16 bit or lower, even though the system has enough colors to display the gradient (thus it looks good in PS), the browser does not.

2) Make sure you're saving at a good enough quality.

You can also run a motion blur on your gradient to help smooth it out - if your gradient is vertical, run a horizontal motion blur, if horizontal blur vertical, etc.
This will help with the file size as well as neatening it up.

There should be no problem saving a gradient as a .GIF, as long as the image isn't huge.

(Edited by DL-44 on 06-09-2004 18:04)

Another possibility..?

If you save a new file as .gif first (not as a copy) then as another format, the other format inherits the characteristics of the .gif file - so banding occurs even if the format is capable of much higher quality. Save a new image as a high-quality file format first, then in the format you want (e.g- save as a .psd file, then 'save as copy').

Or have I got that completely wrong? I'll have to check when I get home. Apologies if so.