Banding and darkness

[FrankTheFrank]

Hey, Here is a quick (PT) jpg render of my project. See the attached image.

1. How can I get rid of the banding?

2. I'm using geometry with an emitting material to light it. Could that be the problem? What if I use HDRI lights?

3. The render looks really dark on my apple retina screens. I render on PC but work on mac. Is there a color setting that I'm missing?

I'm new to 3D so please be gentle.

Thanks

[omardex]

Hi, sadly jpg compress your image and limits the color range to just 8 bits of data, this is why you see the banding there is no much data in the image to fill the transition.

to get rid of the banding you need to save at least a 16 bits in an image format that supports that. (namely tga, tiff, png)

or you can go the extra mile set your imager to linear/2,2 gamma or gamma 2.2 in the response save as exr half float 16 bits and have more data to play in post (namelly photoshop or after effects or any compositing software you fell comfortable with)

I think that 32 bit full float exr is too much for simple post work.

I hope this helps.

Best Regards.

[frankmci]

Another option, if you want to stay in 8 bit/channel color space, is to increase the noise on the flat, dark surfaces, essentially adding good-old-fashioned dithering to the image.

There are probably several ways to do it. Counterintuitively, you may want to render those surfaces with a lower sampling rate, increasing noise and scattering the limited number of available values across a wider zone.

As Omar said, .jpg compression is going to exaggerate any banding, so you might want to choose another format, like .png.