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I was out photographing some performance art this weekend and took a picture that I really like. I had set the camera set to auto ISO to handle the rapid lighting changes, but this unfortunately backfired. When the lighting switched to the backlight shown in the picture below, the camera decided to shoot at 1/4000 instead of lowering the ISO and shooting slower, and since the scene lighting was LED, which flickers, I got ugly stripes showing up in my photo:

enter image description here

Camera Raw's tone adjustments minimize it but the controls aren't really granular enough to eliminate it, and it causes some funky stuff on her head:

enter image description here

How would I fix this using Photoshop CS6?

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  • Wait... Those are arms. I looked at this picture shortly after I woke up and thought they were legs.
    – Joonas
    Oct 6, 2014 at 5:49
  • Can't you just fix the banding after opening it in Photoshop, so not in the RAW-editor? Maybe with some stamping? The photo itself is pretty epic!
    – Rvervuurt
    Oct 6, 2014 at 8:45

1 Answer 1

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Banding fixed

You can fix it almost perfectly by using the gradient tool and the divide blend modes.

EDIT: For the cleanest results, I switched to 16-bit colour mode before performing the following steps.

1) Fill in a thin strip of background with the "ideal" background (I used the gradient tool with the colour picker to get an approximation of the yellowish tones in the background) and stretch it across the whole image, then set it to divide blend mode. This will put the banding artefacts on a white background.

2) Select the same thin strip of image, Ctrl+Shift+C (Copy Merged), hide the banding/divide layer.

3) Paste the thin banding strip (Ctrl+V), hit the "/" key (lock transparency), gaussian blur ~20px, then stretch the band over the whole image using Ctrl+T (transform). Now your whole image looks like just the banding alone.

4) Set that layer to divide blend mode. Voila, banding effect is "divided out" of the original.

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  • Perfect! Thank you very much! Mine wound up with less vignetting than yours so I added another gradient layer, plus I bumped the saturation on her hair. Here's the final result (shameless plug): flickr.com/photos/bb-on/15437485726
    – BB ON
    Oct 6, 2014 at 17:23

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