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Colour banding is a subtle form of posterization in digital images, caused by the colour of each pixel being rounded to the nearest of the digital colour levels. While posterization is often done for artistic effect, colour banding is an undesired artifact. In 24-bit colour modes, 8 bits per channel is usually considered sufficient to render images in Rec. 709 or sRGB. However the eye can see the difference between the colour levels, especially when there is a sharp border between two large areas of adjacent colour levels. This will happen with gradual
gradient In vector calculus, the gradient of a scalar-valued differentiable function f of several variables is the vector field (or vector-valued function) \nabla f whose value at a point p gives the direction and the rate of fastest increase. The g ...
s (like sunsets, dawns or clear blue skies), and also when blurring an image a large amount. Colour banding is more noticeable with fewer bits per pixel (BPP) at 16–256 colours (4–8 BPP), where there are fewer shades with a larger difference between them. Possible solutions include the introduction of dithering and increasing the number of bits per colour channel. Because the banding comes from limitations in the presentation of the image, blurring the image does ''not'' fix this.


See also

* Posterization *
Quantization (signal processing) Quantization, in mathematics and digital signal processing, is the process of mapping input values from a large set (often a continuous set) to output values in a (countable) smaller set, often with a finite number of elements. Rounding and tr ...


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Dynamic range 24 vs 36 bit
Computer graphics Computer graphic artifacts Visual artifacts


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