Gradient Problem

[grumpfuttock1]

Hi, I am using PSP X3 and am rather disappointed with the quality of the gradients. In my copy of PSP v5 I can produce gradients which flow perfectly smoothly from one colour to another, try as I may, I cannot not get the same smooth flow when using X3, the resultant gradient is slightly striped and ugly At first I thought it was maybe the way the editor showed the gradient, but when saved and opened in PSP 5, it still looks awful.

Is this a problem with X3 or am I doing something wrong ? I have tried all sorts of settings on the Fill tool and also the brush tool but it was no better. I have tried creating a new pic as 16 bit and 8 bit, but with no luck. Even the pe-installed Corel gradients look terrible.

[df]

That sounds like 8 bit banding, which is quite annoying for a "Pro" program to have to go through this type of stuff. Try clicking Image > Increase Color Depth > 16 bit RGB but do it just before you apply the gradient. If you have warnings turned off then when another tool needs to work in 8 bit depth it will degrade the image to 8 bit without telling you and your gradients will look like they were painted by 3rd graders.

HTH
Dan

[LeviFiction]

Add noise, and Gaussian blur. Easy way to reduce banding. It doesn't fix anything but there you go.

[grumpfuttock1]

Thank you both for replying.

Dan:- I had tried working in 16 bit, but tried it again just as you suggested. I regret to say that there was no difference. I am now a bit puzzled though as in PSP v5, when I opened a new image, I was given the choice to open as 16.7 million colours (24 bit), seemingly I cannot create a new image as 24 bit in X3, or am I missing something somewhere ? It seems a bit odd that I have the choice of 24 bit colour in a really old version of PSP, but apparently not in what should be a super improved modern version, although I will admit I find all this 8 bit, 16 bit and 24 bit business rather confusing !

Levifiction:- After I had created a new image and added 2% of uniform noise (without monocrome selected) the banding almost disappeared to extremely faint banding. Adding a bit of blur helped, and I really have to stare hard at the image when it is zoomed to 500% to see anything. Thank you so much ! Of course even easier would be to make any background gradients in PSP 5 and then use it in X3 , but that seems a bit crazy !

[df]

It's a bit misleading. What the old program calls 24 bit is actually called 8 bit by the new program. It's 8 bits per channel, Red Green Blue or RGB, 8x3 = 24.

Glad Levi got you going. That's cool.

[grumpfuttock1]

Thanks for the explanation, Dan. I am less confused now.

[df]

The older version of PSP calls it 24 bit. Which is actually 8 bits Red, 8 bits Green, 8 bits Blue. Combine those 8+8+8 and you get 24.
Somewhere along the way everyone switched to another way of calling it. It's assumed that you're working in the RGB spectrum (or Adobe RGB or any other number of RGB's but they are all RGB of some sort), so there's no use in saying 24 bit since you're actually only using 8 bits per channel, so they called it 8 bits per channel. Then we all starting getting into 16 bits per channel. 16 bits Green, 16 bits Red, 16 bits Blue. In the new standard it's just 16 bit (per channel) but if you were to use the older standard of saying it then it would be 48 bits (total).

24 bit (the old way of saying it) is exactly the same as 8 bit (the new way of saying it).