Over the years, working with Illustrator, I've come to expect that Illustrator just has issues with creating gradients, and the only way to get a good smoothly transitioned gradient is to use Photoshop. I'm really suprised that Adobe hasn't solved this by now. I've been reading posts about gradient banding only in dark shadows, that the banding goes away when printing, or people just trying to say that a particular gradient just can't be recreated due to the limitations of a mathmatically defined gradient. I understand completely that the gradients in Illustrator are mathmatically defined, but essentially, so are the gradients in Photoshop, even if they end up being rendered as a bitmap, correct? I also understand that images can have stepped gradients as a result of either color profile gamuts, or bit depth, however the banding I've run into is not a result of monitor issues, limited color gamut, bit depth, or excessively dark gradients and the banding is in Illustrator, shows up in the exported file (tiff, I've also tried rasterizing the AI file in Photoshop with 16bit bit depth and still got banding) as well as prints, because it's IN the file. Below is a Tiff file that shows a gradient created in Illustrator CS6 on the left, Photoshop in the middle and the original art from Illustrator on the right. You won't be able to see the banding in the file unless you download it and view it at 100%.
So, the question is, is there a workaround in Illustrator, or a alternate way of creating gradients directly in Illustrator that will prevent this banding that I've somehow been missing in the 10 years I've been working with it? Also, Adobe, is anyone there trying to solve this problem?
-Matt
