I made a picture in bryce. When it was done rendering, the sky's colors were sectional instead of a smooth gradient. When I import it into Photoshop it looks smooth and perfect, but no matter what format I export it in it comes out sectional again. Any idea why this might be happening - does photoshop use some sort of graphics resolution beyond what you have set up? Thanks Aharon

What's the color depth on your monitor? If you have it set less than 24 or 32 bit color then things will look kinda "sectional". Photoshop does a very good job of dithering images that are made with more colors than the screen resolution supports. You might find that if you raise your color depth then the image will look nice everywhere instead of only in Photoshop.

thanks. I'll give it a shot.

Check to see if you have LZW compression selected. It mangles pictures, makes big noisy pixel blocks especially if you save again as a .jpg later. Photoshop has it turned on by default and you have to go turn it off in the save options dialog box.

Thanks Ingrid, I tried the file as is in Photoshop and set it not to use LZW compression, but it didn't work. the problem is that bryce is actually rendering the sky with color banding. It just looks okay in Photoshop, but I can't get it to output the same way. The od thing is that I'm compositing 3 pictures at various opacities, but I'm not getting each of the banding from each picture. Just a whole new set of hybrid banding. (Does that make any sense?) Any suggestions to bump up the image qaulity in bryce to avoid the color banding? Thanks. Aharon

Sure, it's the same thing you get if you use gausian blur maybe. Try adding noise (low setting , uniform) sometimes that will actually smooth out those kind of effects.