Mobile Phones and Gradient Banding

Most of the design work I do nowadays ends up on mobile phones. Lately, the screens for these phones have more vibrant colors and pretty amazing LCD displays. But some of the phones, even new ones, have difficulty rendering gradients. A lot of the time, gradients end up banding on a phone (color steps), and your once beautiful design ends up chunky, degraded and completely artifacted.

In the past, your choices were to either adjust your gradient (either shortening the length it takes from one color to get to the next or making the colors less drastic), or remove it all together and go flat. I really don't like either of those choices, because, as a designer, it's really limiting. Or you could just leave it.

It seems as though these issues are directly tied to the color depths LCD screens can produce (24 bit compared to 16 bit that most LCD screens see). I won't get into details on why certain phones use X depth compared to Y, because it all truthiness, I don't know.

After some digging around the internet, I came across a tool called DepthDither, by Graphest. It's a free plugin for Photoshop that allows you not only to target a specific color depth (and show you on screen how it will look), it gives you three dithering methods to try fixing the banding. I have to say that the results so far in the last 6-12 months I've been using this tool have been amazing.

Original

At 12 bit (and how a lot of phones would render it)

With DepthDithering applied at 100%

Get it now while it's still free. I imagine the more mobile our world becomes, the more this tool will be in high demand.

Photoshop Feature Request #2

The File menu in Photoshop. Can we move Revert away from Save for Web and Devices? Maybe up there by close? It's too dangerous of a button to be right next to my most used function.

Photoshop Feature Request #1

In the options menu of the Character palette, there's an option called "No Break". If you use this on a word that's been hyphenated in your paragraph, it removes the added break. But what happens when you apply this "No Break" to an entire paragraph? Does it work as expected, not allowing any words contained in the paragraph to hyphenate?

Nope. Your text disappears. Completely. Just vanishes.

The problem with the one by one method of de-hyphenating words is that is takes some time, especially when de-hyphenating one word hyphenates two others.

That's my (frustrated) request of the day.