How to avoid banding in blue skies in small files

[marimagen]

Hi, how do I avoid banding in blue skies in the small jpegs I use in my website. Is there a better compression method/quality combination (or some other trick) I can use to avoid this phenomenon? Thanks in advance, Marie

[Mark D Segal]

Rebuild the sky with a couple of colour fill layers, one darker, one lighter, and a gradient to blend the tonality from darker to lighter to keep it natural-looking. You can select also the exact shade of blue you want on each layer. It's a lot easier than trying to mess with low-data JPEGs. To resave as a JPEG you will need to flatten it, so keep one copy as a TIFF, with the layers intact for future adjustments should the need arise.

[Keith Reeder]

Not enough infomation, Marie - what are you doing to the files before they're "finished"? Is your workflow jpeg from start to finish, or do you do the post-processing "heavy lifting" on tiff conversions of your Raw files? What compression setting are you using for the files? And what software are you processing them in?

[marimagen]

Hi, I start with a raw file. I open it in PS, "clean" it a bit and then I reduce its size (1024 pix and 72 ppp), and save it as a jpeg (medium quality compression to produce a 200 Kb size file).

[Guillermo Luijk]

Why don't you show us what you are talking about?