Quality/Smoothness of CS3 images

[Samus...@adobeforums.com]

Hello,

I've been having problems with Photoshop CS3 lately, for some reason the image quality is always horrible when I'm working on a PSD.

Here's an image as an example:

<http://i36.tinypic.com/4v22k8.jpg>

As you can, see the gradient quality is HORRIBLE.
All I did was add a slightly lighter shade of gray over the background, I have dither checked, I'm using RGB mode, and I'm using 8-bits channeled..

But if I do a simple white to black gradient it turns out smooth, the bad quality gradient only happens when it's two dark colors. Example:

<http://i37.tinypic.com/23nrk0.jpg>

Can anyone help me fix this please?

Thanks
-Sunjo

[xrd...@adobeforums.com]

Not sure if I understand what you have done but a quick bit of experimentation found this bit of information.

If I create an image similar to yours in 8 bit RGB with dither turned on then the gradient looks smooth. If I save that as a jpeg at HIGH quality and reopen it then the dither is gone and you have steps back. The dither is reduced to a slightly ragged edge on the steps which is what you have in the example image.

I may have got your problem wrong but simply saving a dithered shallow gradient as a jpeg will recreate the posterisation.

[Samus...@adobeforums.com]

Thanks, but mine is low quality before I even save it.

[PeterK.@adobeforums.com]

You'll get the banding if there's not enough steps between the first and second colour. It looks like picking two colours that are very close to each other is making a very stepped grad, and the steps are skipping by 2 RGB values per step instead of by ones. You can try fixing what you have by using a combination of adding noise and gaussian blur, but I think the better thing to try to get more steps in there would be by starting with the greater difference between two colours (very light and very dark) to create your grad , then darken down to the level you want.

[J_Ma...@adobeforums.com]

What's your working color space?

[Samus...@adobeforums.com]

I also thought the same thing peter, but I disproved this by manually making a gradient with the same exact start and end colors.

The gradient turned out perfectly smooth.

And I need my "gradients" to be very precise for the work I do, so using brighter/darker colors initially then changing them isn't really an option, changing gradient colors manually causes quality problems as well.

[Samus...@adobeforums.com]

Hmm, that's odd..

I was about to give you my color information, J Maloney (starting and ending color) and used the gradient tool again to test, and I'm not getting the low quality gradients anymore.

Honestly I'm not sure why, but it seems it's fixed itself somehow.

Thanks for the help everyone but it looks like this is 'solved' for now.

[J_Ma...@adobeforums.com]

If it happens again, you might try resetting the gradient tool:
<http://www.adobeforums.com/webx/.59b51428>