Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
Some bands are better than others, and some are so bad I’d quite happily remove them. Of course, I’m talking about banding in your concert images, not the actual bands themselves on stage, although…nope, scratch that thought! I’m strictly talking about photography here, not musical taste.
So what causes this undesirable effect, and if you do encounter it, how do you avoid it or remove it after the fact? In this video, photographer David Bergman tells you how to tackle this frequent problem.
For anybody who’s ever shot video under artificial light with pretty much any kind of video camera, one thing that you’ll often be fighting is flicker. It used to be simple. If you were in the USA or Central and South America, set your shutter speed to 1/60th and you’re good. In most of the rest of the world, 1/50th is the go-to. But gone are the days of energy-wasting inefficient tungsten. Replaced by LEDs that bring a whole new host of potential flickering issues.
Nikon’s solving this issue with their latest v2.10 firmware update for the Nikon Z9 that allows you to adjust your shutter speed very precisely in 1/96th stop increments in order to match your exposure time more precisely to the frequency of the often oddly timed LED light controllers, giving you a more consistent banding and flicker-free shot from frame to frame. It also brings some AF improvements.
For those of us that have dealt with colour in any way digitally in the last decade, we are unfortunately all too familiar with the dreaded colour banding issues. If you’re not sure what colour banding is, then it’s the visual ‘stepping’ of colour that happens in digital files.
It happens a lot and it can happen for any number of reasons. The most common scapegoats for colour banding are usually poor colour depth in our cameras, aggressive compression algorithms with online sites and any number of other technical failings. Although all of these are often part of the problem, I see one other major culprit of severe colour banding and that’s lighting.
We’ve all been there: you sit on a picture forever, bored of retouching, and then when you do get around to it strange things start to show up in it. Like odd rings of graduated color.
These rings of color are called banding. They are nothing more than tonal breaks but before I explain where these obvious changes in tone come from–and how to avoid them–let me show you an example:
If you look at the background on the right-hand side of the image you can see what resembles a staircase of brightness, getting darker as it moves away from the model. That’s banding.
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