How can I prevent banding in images I'm posting on the Internet?

Question

I typically add noise to my images to avoid banding, mostly when posting images on the internet.

Occasionally, I do see banding of an image posted on 500px even though I do not see it in Lightroom (either preview or development).

Are there other tricks to get rid of it? Would it help exporting at a lower resolution?

When exporting your images in Lightroom, what is your compression setting? It could be that your compression setting is not set to the lowest setting, and that 500px.com is adding even more compression which just makes matters worse. — Frank, Jul 30 '18 at 22:12

xiota · Answer 1 · 2018-07-31T22:28:41.070

2

Banding and blotchiness in images is often caused by excessive post processing. There are a few ways to avoid causing such effects:

Capture in RAW and post process with high bit-depth color. Make sure "dithering" is enabled when exporting to 8-bit color.
Use the sRGB colorspace. (Avoid ProPhoto, AdobeRGB, and other wide-gamut colorspaces.)
Limit the amount of post processing.
Make sure editing tools have "dithering" enabled.
Avoid or limit noise reduction.
Add additional noise.

edited Jul 31 '18 at 22:28

answered Jul 29 '18 at 19:51

xiota

how do you enable dithering? – zzzbbx Jul 29 '18 at 20:19
For Lightroom, general internet search turns up nothing for dithering. Your best option is to edit with high bit-depth color, then export to 8-bit. Usually, color management algorithms have dithering built-in. – xiota Jul 29 '18 at 20:34

1 Answers1