More expensive printers have more steps available to reproduce color and so banding is less pronounced. Less expensive printers have fewer steps available and make the banding worse. No matter what you do in Illustrator (or Photoshop) to solve a banding problem when you print, you are at the mercy of the output device.ĭesktop printers have different settings and abilities when it comes to printing blends. If you have banding in a Gradient and are stuck using that printer you may try re-creating the Gradient in Photoshop, see Photoshop Gradients below. So making sure you had a high resolution assigned to the document made a difference.
In older versions of Illustrator (pre-CS versions) the resolution of the document did effect the information in the mathematical equation that was passed to the printer. There is no setting in Illustrator that will solve this problem. If you are seeing banding in a Gradient, it is a product of your printer not the Illustrator file. Illustrator Gradients are mathematical equations that are passed from the EPS or AI file to the printer to re-create the blending of colors that you have asked for. This will not fix blends you have already created, just those you make after you change the setting. This should eliminate banding caused by the tool. This should bring up a dialog box, make sure the pull-down menu is set to Smooth Color. If you are using the Blend Tool and you are getting banding, double-click on the Blend Tool in the Tool Palette. To create a smooth looking Gradient or Blend in Illustrator look to these steps.