Color banding in Blender Internal render output I am preparing to render an animation, and I am experiencing banding colors on a background generated in Blender Internal using a world texture created with a color ramp:



The render generates banding as shown here, highlighted by brown dashed lines:



Earlier versions of the scene used a purer color selection... more in the deep-sea cobalt ranges, and I either did not see banding or there was none...?

Other settings that may be of interest:



Gaussian anti-aliasing on with 16 samples... and I have tried 11 and 8. It is present when no antialiasing is used, as well.

All input welcome!
I am very appreciative of information found on blendhelp.com... (Has the site died?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwrTaXXSZsY

In any case, the solution to my banding involved:

** Select PNG output and 16-bit color depth

** In post-processing, select an appropriate dither amount. I worked between 1 and 2 and seem to get a nice smooth transition.

This explains why I did not see it earlier, as the original color range was probably narrow enough not to generate this banding.

Hope this helps someone in the future!

Please note all input from troy_s below, as these are really helping me dial this in. PNGs did not work as well as Targas, which do not seem to work as well as EXRs.