Color Banding Issue

[BrianHermelijn]

Greetings,

 

After using Affinity for some time, I am noticing a gradiation problem that bugs me. Because when I did a print test, the same problem has occur. This happens when I do gradient or blur on my illustrations. Is this related t  the software itself, color profile or simply the lack of a proper video card can cause this issue?

 

SPECS 

RAM : 8GB

Intel(R) HD Graphics 520

DirectX 12

 

Does better video card equals to better color banding? See attachment for the issue I currently have or is this related to the color profile. Want to find an answer to this problem, so I know what I have to work on to avoid this in the foreseeable future.

 

 

[BrianHermelijn]

Any ideas fellas?

[MEB]

Hi BrianHermelijn,

Regarding the gradients, go to Affinity Designer Preferences, Performance section and make sure Dither gradients is checked.

We are not dithering layer effects (blur, shadows etc) and so there isn't much you can do/enable in the program to change this other than disguise these issues adding some noise manually - you can do this through the Noise colour attribute in the Colour panel or through a Noise filter (in Photo only) or another technique.

 

These are the default profiles used when you start a new document. What profile are you using in that document specifically (menu File ▸ Document Setup, Colour tab)?

 

[BrianHermelijn]

This is the color settings for the new document. 

[Michel Boissonneault]

Hi (Bonjour)!

 

May be it's related to your new document color format. Try RGB/16 instead of RGB/8.

 

16 bit give many more levels of color. Gradient generate a serial of color shades between two defined colors and 8 bit may not render all those shades, resulting in the banding.

 

See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8-bit_color

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_color

 

Michel

 

[lepr]

.

 

[BrianHermelijn]

@owenr

Thanks for the pointers, and I am not using the forum preview, rather the original image itself. Even on my PC it looks the same, I shall test out the settings you recommended and see how that works out.

 

 

@Michel Boissonneault

Thank You for the link, shall check it out.

 

@MEB

Thank You for the insights, will look into it. 

 

 

[lepr]

.

 

 

[MEB]

Hi BrianHermelijn,
Thanks for the info/screenshot. Seems you have imported/started with an image with that profile already embedded (your Affinity Colour Profile settings are the default ones and were not used when you created the document). You should be using a regular document profile for this like sRGB or Adobe RGB (if you intend to print). Changing the colour format to RGB16 may help a bit but since the FX effects (like shadows and blur) currently are not being dithered there's really no option/setting you can enable in Affinity to prevent this from happening. It also happens with other areas/features of the program - i've filled an improvement request regarding these type of issues some time ago and will bump it/link to this thread/add your example to the log to see if this can be improved.

Manually adding noise (no matter how you do it) is the only way I'm aware that helps to disguise that "posterisation".