Recently I used my new Sony mirrorless camera under LED lighting in silent shooting mode (electronic shutter) and the photos had horrible banding – dark stripes across every image. There’s lots of info on this online (it turns out) but to prevent it you need to shoot slow enough for the frequency of the lighting. Lesson now learned.
I couldn’t make any of the remedial instructions online work for me so this is how I did it by separating the brightness and colour of the image and dealing with them separately. Original image:
In Photoshop make 2 copies of the background layer. The top layer will be colour only so change the mode to Color and then hide it. Click on the middle layer and desaturate it (ctl-shift-u on Windows) and change the mode to Luminosity. Then hide the background layer too. You should have a black and white image with the banding on it:
Using this middle layer only, dodge (and burn darker areas if necessary) the banding so that the brightness is consistent:
Make the other 2 layers visible again. You should now have the brightness correct but the colour missing in those stripes:
Using the top (colour) layer, with the brush tool sample the colours next to each band and paint them over the grey areas.
If you can still see banding and the colours are correct then you can keep dodging/burning the luminosity layer until you’re happy:
This sequence was just a quick version for this page so it isn’t perfect!