Banding

[perrinart]

Need help to get rid of banding in photo.
What causes this and how do I get rid of it.
See attachment.
Thanks.

[Cassidy]

Unfortunately the photograph seems too small to be able to appreciate the banding, is this photographed digitally or scanned?

[perrinart]

Shot digitally-here's one at 100kb

[CJ Swartz]

Looks like the folks were having fun, and it's no fun to lose an image of friends/family having a good time.

There's no exposure (EXIF) info in your uploaded image, so I don't know what the original looks like. It appears to be shot indoors, in reduced light with flash, and a number of cameras can show banding problems if they are used at high ISO settings in low light. What was the ISO setting, what was the shutter speed/Fstop, what is the camera make/model? Did other images you shot at the same location show banding? Were they shot at the same time with same lighting or different time and/or different lighting? DPreview.com is an excellent resource for information about digital cameras if you are having a consistent problem with your camera. If you recently purchased your camera, and it is still under warranty, I would do a search at DPreview.com to see if there is a known problem with your particular make/model or if your camera might be possibly in need of replacement/repair. But it could be simply an issue of the lighting and ISO being too high for your camera. Tell us more, and we may be able to help you track down likely causes and ways to prevent losing an image in the future.

[perrinart]

Photo was shot with a Canon ESO 5D
1/60@6.3 ISO 400 28mm
Wedding photographer sent photo to me to be retouched.
Said the cause was interference from other electronics at reception- DJ,
other strobes etc. Need to know if there is an easy way to retouch it out quickly. I'm using PS CS2.

[Cameraken]

Hi Perrinart

Welcome to Retouch Pro.

I’m not sure about the cause of these lines but here is a method to help reduce the problem.

Duplicate the background twice and set the blending mode of them both to lighten
Shift one layer 5 pixels up
Shift one layer 5 pixels down

Select All > Copy Merged > Paste

Add a hide all mask to this layer and turn of the two shifted layers

Now just paint with white onto the mask to paint out the marks.

Hope this helps.

Ken.

[Jerryb]

hi,
Well first I am just a novice and you already have a good reply on eliminating the banding... in fact I am going to experiment and practice it myself...

on the cause... now I don't know much about cannon's but I did some research.. and it appears this can be a common problem with cannon good cameras especially if there high iso setting and low light.... I saw a lot of upset people who had the 1d or the 5d .and had banding issue.. and coupleof other models.. smiles..

Now this link primarily talks about the cannon 1d but there general suggestions may apply to the 5d... basically updating the camera firmware and adjusting tonal curves...
http://www.tow.com/photo/articles/banding/

but I would suggest probably hit the cannon's webpage forum.... get more specific details for you camera....

Originally Posted by perrinart

Need help to get rid of banding in photo.
What causes this and how do I get rid of it.
See attachment.
Thanks.

[Swampy]

Wonderful, Ken! :-)

[perrinart]

Ken, thanks that really helped

[Cameraken]

Hi Perrinart

You are welcome.

I have just purchased a 5D and was not aware of this problem. It appears there have been a couple of firmware upgrades which now eliminate this. It may be worth following Jerry’s links and finding the upgrade

Thanks Swampy.

Ken.

[berwin]

This is an attempt to reduce the banding somewhat in PS7 in conjunction with the plug in "Adaptive Equalization". As you can see in the attached palette copy, first the BG was copied (BG-Copy-AE-150-Filliff-6%) and AE applied with "Add percent of the original" at 150. In the layers palette, the mode was set to "Difference", and the FILL was reduced to 6%. That took out some of the middle tone banding.

Now for the dark tone banding:
A stamp was made of the preceding two layers (Stamp-AE-1-Filliff-6%), AE was applied again with "Add percent of the original" at 1%, the mode was set to "Difference", and the FILL was reduced to 6%. These two AE layers were put into a set for the application of a mask to mask out the darkening effect to the lighter part of the image.

Finally, a stamp was made of all preceding layers and reverse USM applied (Stamp-USM 40, 30, 0) with a mask to reduce the USM in the dark and too light areas.

Assigned aRGB to pop up colors and converted to sRGB for posting.

Warning:
This method seems to work well in PS7, and perhaps also in PS6, but may not work in PSCS, and perhaps above. The behavior of the FILL seems to work differently here.

Regards,

Berwin

[chillin]

I used:
FFT BandpassFilter
Neat Image
& some scratch remover in PSP

[Cameraken]

Hi Chillin

Please could you point me to some info on a FFT Bandpass Filter?
Google found a little info on Matlab. Is that what you are using or is there another program.
I have used FFT before but I’ve never heard of FFT Bandpass

Thanks.

Nice job. Berwin


Ken.

[chillin]

Here you can download the ImageJ plugins
and here the application

[Cameraken]

Hi Chillin

Thanks.

I already had ImageJ installed but I had never looked at all those plug-ins.

Looks like I’ve got some new toys to play with now.

Thanks Again.

Ken.

[Kraellin]

chillin,

how do you like imagej? i had heard mixed things about it.

[chillin]

It has a lot to offer for someone who knows what to do.
I just scratched the surface, but I like to experiment
Here I tried again

[Bojin Taylor]

How did you finish up with this?
I see a lot of feedback on the probable cause and a little on correcting it.
I have the 5D and recently shot the Nutcracker performance. I had intermittant banding in the shadows.Maybe 1 shot in 50. I was shooting @ 1600 which surprisingly enough rarely gives me any trouble.
Can I see your finnished work onn this image and what you did to clean it up?

[Cameraken]

Hi Bojin.

Can you not see the pictures here?
Post your image here if you want. We can try yours.

Ken.

[Bojin Taylor]

this is an example. it was not consistant maybe 1 in 50 and even more random then that.

[chillin]

One hour with ImageJ & Neat Image…I think it could be done much better than that.

[Bojin Taylor]

maybe 3 minutes running a noise ninja filter on it.

[Cameraken]

Hi Bojin.

I used a similar method as the first one but I added a edge mask

Duplicate the image twice and set their blending mode to lighten
Shift one layer 2 pixels left
Shift one layer 2 pixels right

As the banding was more sever on this image I added a mask to protect the edges

I made the mask using glowing edges filter and applied it to the finished image


Ken.