Trying to reduce banding when printing gradients

<p>I'm doing post production work on a book that has lots of gradients where a color fades to white. I'm soft-proofing using the cmyk profile supplied by the print house. When I soft-proof with the cmyk profile I can see my broad gradients become much steeper, that is the transition from a color to white happens much more quickly over a smaller area and is less gradual. The only thing that seems to alleviate this is reducing saturation, but I don't see why this is necessary since the colors are not very saturated and when I turn on the gamut warning nothing is out of gamut.</p>

<p>The nice gradients in the image are being totally compressed and it's having a negative effect on the image. Is there a way to reduce this?</p>

<p>Thank you.</p>

<p>adding some noise to a greay layer set to soflight, around 3% monochromatic should do it.</p>

<p>Try working in 16 bit mode if you can, it gives much finer steps and usually avoids such problems.</p>