Recently started having screen "banding" or "moss"

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Recently started having screen "banding" or "moss"

I have two separate monitors. One is my built-in, mid-2010 macbook pro laptop monitor. The other is a Cintiq 13HD. Both are high quality and have never had any problems.

With Mavericks, I did notice that sometimes before I logged into my account, that is, on the user sign-on screen, I would see the "banding" or "moss" effect on my screen, where the colors don't shift from one to the next naturally. But with Mavericks, once I entered my username and password the banding would go away. Clearly, it was an operating system issue, and not one with my monitors. As it was not a consistent problem and did not interfere with my workflow, it didn't matter.

Upon upgrading to Yosemite today, I immediately noticed banding in my gradients on both monitors.

As a professional creative digital artist, it is important that I get this fixed.

I used my SpyderPro4 hardware to recalibrate both monitors, but this did not alleviate the problem.

Does anyone know why this is happening all of a sudden? Is this a Yosemite bug? Or is there some system file that I can alter to get rid of this?

Thank you.

Bryan

MacBook Pro (17-inch Mid 2010), OS X Mavericks (10.9.4)

Posted on Oct 17, 2014 10:04 PM

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Answer 1

Oct 28, 2014 2:09 PM in response to bryanbeus

I have this issue too on a MacBook Pro Retina Mid-2012 model (nVidia 650M graphics card). In System Prefs, it shows the nVidia CUDA driver as version 6.0.46 (the latest available).

Unlike a PC, we can't just upgrade our video driver but I'm sure we'll have to wait for Apple to fix this issue with an update -- unless someone else has a fix.

This is driving me NUTS as I too rely on accurate color reproduction for my work.

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Answer 2

bryanbeus Author

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Oct 28, 2014 2:17 PM in response to janericster

Ya, I was beginning to suspect this was a video card issue.

If anyone at Apple is listening, please get this fixed!

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Answer 3

Oct 28, 2014 2:34 PM in response to bryanbeus

It's almost as if certain systems are stuck in a lower color depth bit level -- like 8 or 10 bit instead of 24 or 32. And of course like all things Apple, they pretty much have removed any ability to tinker with adjustments.

My much older iMac (2009) does not have the color banding issue with Yosemite. So it is definitely a problem with specific video graphics cards on certain Macs. I recommend posting a bug report on the OS X feedback page:

Apple - Mac OS X - Feedback

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Answer 4

Oct 28, 2014 2:56 PM in response to janericster

A few more notes...

A friend of mine said to install a utility called Display Maestro (15 day trial available) to confirm if the color bit level was less than 32 bits. I did that and can confirm the system is running at 32 bit color depth. So that's a dead end.

Then he said to check the problem when the MacBook is running in "discrete" graphics mode vs "integrated" mode. I did that. And both modes have the issue. So again, another dead end.

Finally, he recommended that I check (enable) "Reduce transparency" under System Prefs > Accessibility > Display. That too had no effect.

I posted a bug report and hopefully Apple *will* resolve and fix this quickly.

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Answer 5

bryanbeus Author

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Oct 31, 2014 1:23 AM in response to janericster

Excellent. That's as good a solution as we can find for now. Thanks for your work on this. I'll fill out a bug report.

Good luck! Hope this is fixed soon. It's a serious issue.

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Answer 6

jfkf14

Level 1

4 points

Nov 22, 2014 8:25 AM in response to bryanbeus

I had this exact issue too and I think I found a fix. I recently sent my Macbook Pro in to Apple, where they replaced the logic board and memory, I also upgraded it to Yosemite at this time. After I got it back I started having this exact banding issue and figured it was related to the major hardware and software changes, so I called in and got help.

The tech had me do two resets. The System Management Controller reset, and the NV RAM (aka P RAM) reset. These seem to have fixed the problem. I'll report back if I have any further issues.

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