Let your bike do the work instead of your back
SO THERE’S THAT big empty space between your handlebars and your seat. Why not carry your stuff there, instead of over the wheels, upsetting your bike’s equilibrium, or on your back, resulting in the dreaded Sweaty Back Syndrome?

Here's another kind of tutorial, in which I shared my understanding of an oft-misunderstood, technical topic on the Adobe Illustrator Group discussion page in Linked in. Not a paid gig, but well received by this group of discerning professionals.

Here's what I know about banding… Any transition between one color and another, in the digital world, is divided into a number of steps. If it's a short enough distance and there are enough available colors in the palette, the steps occur so close together that the eye resolves it as a continuous flow. This is similar to watching a film being run slower than 28 frames per second; you'll see flickering rather than smooth motion.

So it becomes a problem when, somewhere along the line, the computer's (or printer's) palette of colors is not large enough to provide enough steps from point A to point B. For example, if the distance between point A and B is 6 inches, and A = solid magenta and B = solid cyan, and you have X number of colors in your palette, then the number of steps needed to resolve the banding is 66% of X* (magenta and cyan comprise 2/3 of the RGB gamut) divided by 6 inches. That will give you color steps per inch. If it's not as high as our mediums pixels or dots, two or more of the same color will be next to each other, and banding will start to become visible.

* note that I'm simplifying – actually it's a lot less than that, because my simplification is not accounting for lightness or darkness, just R,G and B at full strength.

Assuming it's a print job (and ignoring for now the RGB > CMYK conversion that needs to happen), if the dpi is less than the result of that math, you'll see banding. This will become more of a problem if it's a subtler gradient of colors – say 10% magenta -to- 30% magenta – over a longer distance, say 60 inches. Your color palette is not likely to be able to provide enough steps to hide the stepping effect.

Finally, banding usually becomes a problem when the originating screen image – let's say a gradient box in RGB in Adobe Illustrator – has to resolve itself in another color space – let's say either a CMYK print job or a GIF on the internet limited to a web-safe color palette. Your computer screen's RGB gamut provides millions or even billions of steps, enough to hide most banding. On the printing side, CMYK has a lot fewer steps in its gamut, so problems might crop up under worst-case scenarios, like the 10-30%M/60in example above. And a finer dpi screen will make banding more apparent than a coarser, noisier dpi screen. On the internet side, the antiquated web-safe gamut of only 256 steps at 72 ppi is practically guaranteed to show steps; that's why web-safe GIFs should only used for solid blocks of colors with only vertical or horizontal boundaries. Even a diagonal boundary in a web-safe GIF will produce jaggies, because the anti-aliasing will have a limited palette of steps to work with.