Hi guys welcome and welcome back to another five minute Friday with me international
multi-award-winning portrait photographer Jessica McGovern i basically use these videos to
try and share a tip technique or tool within five minutes in a way that's easy to understand for
anybody who wants to up-skill their photography now today's topic is something that i think might
be useful if not now then definitely in the future so this video is probably one to save
just because you're probably going to need it at some point without further ado let's get started
so today's five minute Friday topic is all about banding which you'll already know because it'll be
in the title but the important part about this particular video is how to treat banding that
already exists inside an image so what causes banding banding is usually caused by super
aggressive editing pulling a colour gamut further than it possibly can go or by incorrect export
procedures export processes and formats so banding is usually always 99.9 percent of the time caused
by you in editing and therefore the single best way to treat banding is to find where it started
and fix it because fixing it afterwards doesn't actually improve your whole process and you're
gonna have to do this all the time however there will be specific times where you're going to need
to go in and fix it and so that's what we're covering off today the way to fix banding is
really quite straightforward and we're going to use an image which was submitted by one
of our MTogs Liza today first of all where are the bands for me it's blindingly obvious where
they are you can see these rings happening through the image right can you see them
these rings are classic banding okay so they go all the way across to this lighter area image
is absolutely freaking gorgeous so we do want to fix it now how do you see banding if you're
not 100 percent sure easiest way is to apply a solar curve adjustment layer because the solar
curve apart from making things look terrifying is really good to show very very obvious bands
so that's how to find banding but how do we treat banding super simple so what we're going to do is
we're going to duplicate our background layer okay and then what we're going to do is we're going to
go ahead and go up to filter and we're going to go into blur and we're going to go ahead and choose
surface blur okay now we're going to start with the radius at 1 and the threshold around about 18
to 20 you don't have to be too specific and what we're wanting to do is zoom in if you can on an
area that has these bands okay so i can see these bands super clearly here then what i'm going to
do is incrementally drag and let go this surface blur up until i can no longer see any evidence
of the original bands so i'm to be honest around about here which is 15 pixels but for you this
might be different now i've zoomed out and i can see the band still present so i'm going to just
push it a little bit further along let's go to 20 and now i feel confident that i can no longer see
the bad bands that we had originally you may be able to see new lines right new lines don't
panic leave them ignore park them we're going to solve it when you've done that and you've
got this setting nailed in we're going to click ok and that's basically set that surface blur to be
acting on this layer then what we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and add some noise now
it's very important to do this step because if you don't it doesn't really fix all types of banding
so we're going to go into filter we're going to go into noise and then we're going to go into
add noise when we add the noise what we're wanting to achieve here is a level of noise really that
matched the original file because every image has got noise in it so one percent is sometimes
sufficient two percent that can sometimes match the original level of noise i'm gonna go with one
percent for this image because it was quite clean to start with so one percent and i'm specifically
on gaussian with monochromatic checked and then i'm going to click okay so with that done then
what we need to do is get the dog or the subject whatever it might be and also anything in the mid
ground or foreground out of this effect because at the moment that looks ridiculous so what do
we do i would always go down to your original background layer make sure we clicked on that and
then we're going to do a select and we're going to do subject then what i'm going to do is click
back onto my layer that i've done my surface blow my add noise on and then click the mask icon and
what that's going to do is it's going to create a mask which looks like the subject right so we're
going to make sure that that mask is clicked on and then do command i to invert the mask that's
popped the dog the subject out of the effect so then all that's left to do is grab a brush
i'm going to grab a black brush so i'm making sure we're on black if photoshop's scary for you
there is a video photoshop basics and then we also do have our photoshop for beginners online course
so i'm going to go grab that black brush make sure we're on 100 opacity and 100 flow and then i'm
going to just go and take out anything that's in the mid ground or the foreground right mid ground
or the foreground and what i'm also going to do is drop to about 30 percent and just whiz around the
edge of our subject just to make sure that we have got all of those little bits popped out including
our little bugs so what are we left with here we're left with an image that doesn't have any
banding and if we want to we can do a solar curve check there is now no bands no bands here not at
all no banding and so what we've done is we've solved the banding by adding a surface blur and
a noise layer and so guys it's literally that simple so what do we do we duplicate the layer
we go ahead and add a surface blur we then go ahead and add noise to that same layer then
we mask out the subject the mid ground and the foreground if you don't know what the mid ground
is anything that's in focus in the image just whip it straight out and anything in the foreground is
in kind of in front of that towards the camera so you want to take out of all of that and then at
that point you should theoretically have solved your banding issue however remember please guys
go back in your editing and find out where those bands started because finding where it
started means that you will not make that mistake again and that is far better than doing this fix
however this exists if you need it and so that is today's five minute Friday hopefully that was
helpful for you really excited to be back next week with another tip so if you haven't already
go ahead and hit the subscribe button share this with your friends or photographers or just anybody
who might use this because that would be super and i'll see you all again really really soon