Color Banding (Patreon)

A deck of cards pointed it out in the previous image how horrible the banding was. Normally I don't use this many gradients in a drawing so I don't have a frequent banding problem. Commissioners usually wanted their characters depicted with the correct colors for their characters, which meant lighting had to be, for the most part, neutral. But since I can play around with colors and lighting with these sketches, the usage of gradients has gone up.

Gradients cause color banding (and hilariously, the color banding was shifting as I was adding in the arrows). I could paint the gradients in place but that would negate that these are suppose to be quick daily sketches (well, ok, adding color at all negates that these are suppose to be quick daily sketches, but painting in gradients would take even more time). 

Enter the 16 bit channel image, with its increase in number of colors available. Which largely solves the problem, but there was still some color banding (even with new fresh gradients in place). Adding a little noise filter helped smooth it out. I did try adding the noise filter to the 8 bit channel image, but there was still banding.

I do want the less banding and better color quality, of course, but I can't really afford my file sizes going from ~200 MB (8 channel) to 1.5 GB (16 channel) while maintaining the current image resolutions of 8k x 10k (oh, I should upload the bigger images at the end of the month or something).

Something's gotta give cause:

1) I certainly don't have enough hard drive space for 1 GB a day

2) the computer I'm using is hefty but not that hefty, so the extra channel does cause a delay in work.

I think I'm going to be lowering the resolution of images and using 16 bit for a few images and going to see how that goes '3' 

It's a silly amount of work for something that occurs infrequently, but why even have this be an issue in the first place.

Let me know if the color banding bothered you at all in the first place, maybe now that I pointed it out you might be looking for it >w>;