Remove color banding from photos online
Upload a photo and eliminate color banding, tonal striping, and gradient artefacts for free, with no software or account required.
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What causes color banding in photos?
Every color channel in an 8-bit image, the format used by JPEG and standard PNG, can hold exactly 256 distinct values. A smooth color shift, like a sky fading from deep blue to pale at the horizon, needs a continuous range of tones. With only 256 steps available, the transition breaks into visible jumps: that's color banding. The stripes land wherever color changes gradually: skies, backgrounds, fog, smooth painted surfaces. High-bit-depth formats like RAW or 16-bit TIFF have enough steps to keep transitions invisible, but exporting to 8-bit compresses that range and the bands appear.
Why does saving a photo reduce its color quality?
Lossy compression is the main reason. JPEG and similar formats achieve small file sizes by permanently discarding color and detail data. The encoder makes assumptions about what the eye can tolerate, and at high compression those assumptions fail visibly: color patches become blocky, edges grow halos, and fine gradients turn muddy. Color banding that was barely noticeable in the original can become stark after compression, because the encoder flattens tonal variation instead of preserving it.
How to remove color banding from photos
- Edit from a high-bit-depth source. Keep your working file in RAW or 16-bit TIFF format throughout post-processing. The additional tonal steps mean banding never forms in the first place. Export to JPEG only as the final step.
- Smooth and texture in Photoshop. A Surface Blur applied to the banded area rounds off the harsh tonal steps; a very light luminance noise layer (0.5–2%) replaces the regularity with organic grain the eye reads as detail. Keep both on masked adjustment layers to isolate the effect.
- Remove color banding online with our free tool above. Drop in your image, dial in the correction strength, and download the fixed result. It works across JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and more, directly in the browser, with no account or installation 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