InDesign to Photoshop Gradient

Qbot

Well-known member
Anybody ever copy and paste a Gradient from InDesign into Photoshop? I'm doing this to combat the banding i'm seeing in the gradient (adding noise in photoshop). Seems to help but this is being run on our screen press and I'm a little out of my element with this.
 
hi,

Are you sure you don´t see banding because the monitor is not calibrated as well?

So maybe you have a gradient with very few levels for example 0-5% and 4 inch width and that smooth shade tecnology in the RIP (postscrip Level 3) won´t work?

if, then It depends from the situation in the layout, but maybe this is a suitable workaround for your issue:


1
copy to photoshop (rescept your color workingspaces! do not convert, keep values)

2
in Photoshop:
place as pixel, save and made a copy

3
in the copy: filter: noise
and than smoothfilter: comand+F (gausscher Weichzeichner/blur?) try above 10 pixels or so much you need

4
might be, you have to repair the starting and the ending points with curves in Photoshop (Gradationskurven) down to zero up to former value 5 in the example.
(With info about Lab you can controll comparing with the saved as pixel placed step before. Differences "around" DeltaE 1 is okay.)




Hope this helps,

Ulrich
 
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Gradient is 0-15. I guess they want to put it on using the gradient the way it was supplied. Should be interesting...

Ulrich, thanks for your input on the photoshop work-a-round
 
I've never liked the results when pasting gradients from some vector program into Photoshop -- I've always gotten better results by actually recreating the gradient from scratch in Photoshop. If you do that, you might not even need to add the noise. I've only needed to do that if it's a very small color change over a large distance. And when I do need to add noise, it always seemed to me that adding any kind of blur negated any benefit the noise provided. The whole purpose of the noise is to randomize and break up the gradient, but blurring it essentially undoes that.

(This is just my experience and results on my equipment - everyone's got different techniques that work for them, so try everything and do whatever works for you!)

Luckily, every since direct-to-plate, I hardly ever have to fight gradients like this.
 
I've never liked the results when pasting gradients from some vector program into Photoshop -- I've always gotten better results by actually recreating the gradient from scratch in Photoshop

DCurry, you are correct. Much better result by recreating the gradient in photoshop. Lesson learned... Thank you!
 
Well . . . the gradient is 0-15% over how many inches, what is the mesh of the screen, what is your screen lpi . . banding may not be avoidable

but couldn't answer the question without those variables . . . .
 

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