• Asked by
• Penélope C.
• |
• January 20, 2012
• |
• Nobody else has this question

A technical question about artifacts!

Hi Yuri,

I'm starting by saying that I love your job, everything you and you team do is magical.

Im writing to you from Spain, I did not know if I could, mainly because I did not want to disturb you.

I attached two files with artifacts. I work with Lion (iMac), Leopard (Mac Book Pro), Win 7, CS3, CS4 and CS5 and Canon EOS 50D camera (max quality) and I always get the same result at 100% view in every computer I have mentioned before. They are 8 bits files (as you said that 16 bits files are not better than 8 bits files). The moment I apply some filter, mainly blur, I get artifacts and when I paint with a brush I get artifacts too.

I googled this a lot but I've found nothing about that, I rarely ask for help because I found everything I need by googling it, but not this time.

Do you have any clue of what it is going on?

Thank you in advanced.

Bests regards,
Penélope

• Answered by
• Yuri
• |
• March 13, 2012
• |
• No one likes this yet

Hi Penélope.
Thank you for an excellent question!
What you're seeing are not artifacts. It's banding problems. This is a consequence of one of two things: Either you're working with exceptionally low jpeg-quality or you're stretching the file to an extreme that is way beyond what color information is available in the image. Your cases of banding are actually so severe, I've never seen anything like it. Normally, professional photographers will not come to this point, so you're doing something very wrong in your processing.
You shouldn't use filters. Filters are for newbies, and this could be the reason for your problems.
The way to fix banding problems is to create some noise. So put some noise on your layers and masks, and this should fix the problem.

I hope you could use my advice. :)
Good luck! :)

Best Regards Yuri Arcurs