Fix sky banding in photos online
Fix sky banding, gradient stripes, and tonal steps in landscape and architecture photos for free, with no software or account needed.
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Why does my sky have visible stripes?
The sky is the single most common place banding appears in photography. A clear sky is essentially a long, very gradual gradient, from deep at the zenith to pale at the horizon, and gradual gradients are exactly where sky banding shows up. An 8-bit export (JPEG, standard PNG) only has 256 tonal steps per channel. When a gradient spans a narrow range of those steps, the image has to round each tone to the nearest available value, and you see the rounding as distinct stripes across what should look perfectly smooth. Wide-angle landscape shots, architectural exteriors, and any image with a large expanse of open sky are especially susceptible.
Does JPEG compression make sky banding worse?
Considerably. Even a sky that looks band-free in your editing software can show obvious stripes after a JPEG export. Lossy compression quantizes tonal values to shrink file size, pushing similar shades into a single value and sharpening the steps between tonal bands. Skies processed with strong tone curves, graduated filters, or heavy exposure adjustments are particularly at risk, because those edits stretch the tonal range thin before the encoder takes another pass at it. Saving the file again only compounds the damage.
How to get rid of sky banding
- Protect your sky at export time. Edit from RAW or 16-bit TIFF and export to JPEG at the highest quality setting your workflow allows, as a single final step. Avoid re-encoding: once a sky is banded, each subsequent JPEG save deepens the stripes.
- Smooth the sky in Photoshop. Isolate the sky on a masked layer, apply a Surface Blur to round off the tonal steps, then add 0.5–2% luminance noise to break the regularity. The noise disguises the gradient boundaries as natural atmospheric texture rather than digital banding.
- Fix sky banding online with our free tool above. Upload your photo, pick a correction strength, and download the result with the banding removed. Works on JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and other formats with no login or software required, and results are instant in the browser.
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