Home Wikituition Browse all terms Categories
Random term
Sensors & Digital Capture

Banding Noise

Horizontal or vertical stripes appearing in heavily lifted shadows, caused by variations between readout channels.

In depth

Because a sensor is read out through many parallel amplifiers, tiny differences in their offsets produce stripes rather than random grain. The eye detects structured noise far more readily than random noise, so banding becomes objectionable at levels where equivalent random noise would be invisible. It is a common limit on how far shadows can be pushed.

Examples in practice

Lifting an underexposed interior by four stops reveals faint horizontal stripes across the darkest wall.