rheisch

<p>Can someone help me understand gradient banding? In some of my images, the sky is a perfectly smooth gradient of blues; in others, I see the stair-stepping gradients, very pronounced. I thought it might be my monitor but see it in the prints and I created a greyscale image with both radial and linear gradients (where I see definite banding/stair-stepping) and had it printed and the resulting print contains the same banding. In this example image (<a href="../photo/10946190&size=lg">http://photo.n et/photo/10946190&size=lg</a>) I've created a radial gradient in a 16 bit image and zoomed to 3200%, turn on the info window and drag the color sample pen horizontally across the banding I see on my monitor: I see the RGB values at 56, slide across a visible change in the level, and it stil l reads 56, then drag a bit further and it changes to 55, but with no noticable, visual change from 56 to 55. I've read different suggestions in the PN forums, tried filtering/etc, but the banding just shifts around. I shoot raw, then bring into PS as 16bit sRGB; I don't understand, with 2^16=65536 levels, how you can still have banding. And I don't understand how I see banding on the monitor but no info:rgb change, and then info:rgb change w ith no visible change (and also see the same banding in prints so I think I've ruled out monitor issues (I have a Dell U2410 lcd calibrated with Spyder3)). I'd appreciate getting "schooled" and sorry if this has been covered in some other category that I missed. Thanks.</p>