Massive banding issue in Photoshop with new monitors :(

[Rikki]

Hey folks,

I bought a pair of BenQ LED backlit monitors about a month ago after everyone saying how amazing they are, but as soon as I started to use them in Photoshop I could see issues with the colour selector and a really bad banding issue in the gradients :

BenQ monitor:

Dell 19" 1907 which is about 4 years old:

I thought this was a monitor issue and I wasnt really that impressed by them anyway so I went ahead and bought a Dell 23" U2311H E-IPS and installed it on Saturday.

To my horror its doing exactly the same kinda thing with the banding in photoshop

I'd thought with the BenQ it was a monitor issue but this is proving that not to be the case.

I installed the latest nVidia drivers from their site, reset all display settings to default, checked I was of course running in 32bit color mode and not 16bit etc etc but its still the same.

The graphics card is a 512mb 8800GT, not Oc'd or anything and its been running happily for the last 2 years with my two old displays:

Dell 19" - 1907FP @ 1280x1024
Dell 17" - 1024x768

But running with my two new montors both at 1920x1080 its giving me this weird banding.

Can anyone shed any light?

My rig spec is as follows:

Q6600 @ 3.4GHz
4GB
nVidia 8800GT 512mb
Windows XP Home SP3 with all latest updates
Latest nVidia drivers etc

Thanks,

Rik

 

[wunkley]

I get banding on my screen (Dell 24") unless I go into Colour Management settings within the windows (7) control panel and change from the default monitor colour profile.

Select your device, tick the box underneath saying 'use my settings for this device' then the Add button then choose Adobe 1998 profile, then click the 'Set as default profile' button

This definitely makes things better for me, and I also make sure photoshop is using Adobe 1998 as the colour workspace so everything ties together nice.

Don't know if it's the same for xp though...

 

[coolamasta]

Yeah seen this before and had it on a couple of extended desktop monitors in work, I done something similar to what wunkley said but I think I changed it to RGB something or other.

Are you connected via DVI or VGA? If VGA I would recommend you change to DVI for better digital pic quality and also normally windows update will pick up monitor and pull down right monitor profile anyway

 

[Rikki]

That worked!

Went in and the ICC profile was set to BenQ - removed it and wayhey its fixed the banding, not only on the Dell BUT also the BenQ!