De-band and clear artifacts from a photo for free

What is banding?

8-bit images have 256 steps per channel. That's not enough to represent a smooth gradient without visible jumps between tones. The eye reads those jumps as stripes: that's banding. It shows up most on skies, painted walls, and anything with a slow, even tonal shift. It rarely appears at capture (RAW and 16-bit TIFF have far more steps), but it surfaces on export, a smooth gradient that looked fine in Lightroom suddenly has visible stripes after export to JPEG or 8-bit PNG.

Why does my photo look blocky or pixelated?

That's usually compression artifacts, the side effect of JPEG and other lossy formats discarding detail the algorithm assumes you won't notice. At low quality settings you see blocky patches, halos around sharp edges, and an overall muddy softness. It also gets worse every time you re-save: a file saved three times will look noticeably worse than the same file exported once at the same quality setting.

How to fix banding and compression artifacts

1. Work in a lossless format for as long as possible. Keep your master as a RAW or 16-bit TIFF all the way through editing. Export to JPEG only once, as the last step.
2. Selectively blur and add micro-noise in Photoshop. A Surface blur on a gradient area smooths out the steps; a tiny amount of luminosity noise (0.5–2%) breaks up the regularity so the eye reads it as texture instead of stripes. Apply both on a masked layer so it only touches the affected areas.
3. Fix photo quality online with our free tool above. Upload the image, pick a strength level, and download the result. It can even fix JPEG quality on over-compressed files. Works on JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and more, with no account or software needed.

Want to learn more?

We wrote a whole article on the topic in our blog with a more detailed view on the problem and solutions: De-banding and fixing compression artifacts