Thread

Yesterday I started working on a new project and notice my gradients were of terrible quality. The larger the worse. I know is not Photoshop since is happening on every application. Even the Windows interface is affected. I don’t know why.. i haven’t changed any setting in my PC.

Has anyone had this problem before? If so can you give me advice on how to fix this? I need to get to work and I really don’t want to restore my PC.

Thanks before hand

Can you post a screenshot? If you’re having stepping issues, check your display properties by right-clicking on your desktop, select “Properties,” “Settings” tab, and make sure your color quality is set higher than 8-bit.

Did you recently have a Windows update? Install DirectX upgrades? You might also try to re-install your video driver.

I cheat, alistapart gradients are really nicely shaded.
One can resize and they are still nicely shaded. I imagine thats what you mean, the grad shading not being lines etc?
The example page  has black and white and are good when overlaid over any color…

Bruce - Nice but way too make hacks for my taste. Especially with IE8 coming.

Thanks for your help guys!

Can you post a screenshot? If you’re having stepping issues, check your display properties by right-clicking on your desktop, select “Properties,” “Settings” tab, and make sure your color quality is set higher than 8-bit.

Did you recently have a Windows update? Install DirectX upgrades? You might also try to re-install your video driver.

Yes I checked my setting and the color quality is set to 32 bit. The last update I had before this started happening was a Norton update. I attached a screen shot of a gradient created in photoshop and a screen shot of my browser. If you look closely you can even see how the gradients in the EE website are affected.

@ PXLated

I’m not a graphics guy so I cheat. No hacks tho,
I have used one of the shaded black or white transparent images there over a background in photoshop, dats is all I do, then save the image…

My graphic designer shudders at what I do…lol
.

Thanks Bruce2005 but I didn’t had to do any of that two days ago. All my gradients where always nice and smooth and all of the sudden they lost their quality.

sorry, I was starting to think I was off topic… 😊
or missed the point, or the boat or something lol

Yeah, that screenshot looks perfect on my machine.

I think it’s your display driver, especially as you note it’s not localized to one application and is apparently not transporting through print to screen.

First, turn your monitor off and pull the display cable out of the back of your computer. If you have canned air, spray the internal connections, to get rid of any dust. Re-connect, being sure to seat the plug securely and screw the locking screws all the way down.

Then, if that didn’t help, try upgrading and, if necessary, re-installing your display driver. Check your version of DirectX and, if possible after upgrading the driver, upgrade.

I don’t imagine Norton is messing things up, but as a rule, the only Norton software I use is Ghost. The rest is junk and impossible to uninstall. Neither here nor there, I suppose.

You could also have a virus that has used a buffer overflow to right over part of your hardware configuration files.

That screenshot looks fine here as well.
It’s certainly a display driver or hardware problem.

Thanks Jared & deus62. Is good to know that it could only be a display problem. I’ll start working on Jared’s advice and hopefully this will fix the problem.

Ok I did everything Jared suggested and nothing worked. I even did a factory restore with no luck… the problem persist. Any other suggestions???

Hmm…

Ok, tell us what you have:

* Operating system w/service pack
* Video card (brand and model)
* Whether you're overclocking your video card or some other business
* Whether you're running your OS in a Virtual Machine (such as parallels on a Mac)

Vista has some issues with display drivers, so it’s possible that’s where the issue is. One suggestion on a forum I found was to disable power saving features, as Vista has display power-save functionality that can be kicking in and downresing your display. Does the problem seem to go away if you restart, only to pop-up again?

You could also try restarting in safe mode if in XP/Vista and upgrading your display driver. It could be the update didn’t take hold (had this happen on USB driver updates).

Could it possibly be a very simple thing like the contrast is bumped up too high on your monitor?

Best wishes,

Mark

Whilst I can’t offer any assistance with your dilemma, this sort of thing makes me happy that I switched to Mac! PC problems used to drive me potty. 😠