Why in the world illustrator doesn't support 16-bit depth? Very sad and disappointed.

I have recently been working with gradients in Illustrator, but there is horrendous banding in the gradient. I can get around this by implementing a rich colour gradient. But this only works if you are graduating from one colour to black.

As a tip, I always check the colour values of my starting colour, say C40 M100 Y20.
When graduating to black, I include these values. So Black would be C40 M100 Y20 K100. This is so that my black contains the same amount of CMY as the original colour. Thus the result is a richer gradient with less banding.

I think it's due to general misconception of motion graphics workflows by the Illustrator team.
Illustrator has some video templates, but these are not very usefull.
When working in RGB for video, we need to start on black, and have 16bpc. Most of us do not need the green video rulers and center marks.

Smooth Gradients!

Hello Adobe Team,
I really enjoy working with Adobe programs, especially with Illustrator. – I think 16bit workflow support would be crucial!! to all the users/visual artists like me who need inkjet prints as output for their clients/collectors in best color quality and without 8bit banding problems in gradient parts of their artworks. –– Thanks!

Would love to see this. Illustrator almost feels like it's stuck in the past. 24 bit color is so 1990's. Time to move on, especially with HDR monitors becoming more the norm. Please add at least 16 bpc color support.

Affinity Designer has 16 bits per channel... Maybe it's time to move.

Been waiting for this for years. I doubt it's gonna happen.

+1 and all that, for all of you suffering from the lack of this exporting capability, Affinity Designer exports 16 bit just fine and I use it for all my 3D needs now.

16 bit please! I have occasion to use 16bit with motion graphics and gradients from illustrator always suffer when imported into after effects.

Agree! Are there alternatives that can do more than 8 bit?

Why do we have these beautiful gradient tools which only output 8 bit?

@MJL in Australia
Since most printing techniques have far less color gradations available (a much smaller colorspace), it would be even better when (on top of the very welcome 16 bit mode), Illustrator Gradients had a scatter or noise option, to avoid banding.

Being imprisoned in 8-bit land is a miserable shortcoming of Illustrator for those of us who like to print things on paper. I am appalled to find that Illustrator, which I recently bought on a commercial printer's advice, is useless for creating 16-bit gradient fills and exporting to 16-bit TIFFs. This makes it useless, and expensively so, for the work I do.

Not all of us print solid-fill graphics for 4-colour press work. We need high-resolution giclee printing on RGB devices directly from vector artwork, with gradient fills that don't band horribly!

Think of the great displacement maps we could bake if we had 16 or 32-bit depth! It would be amazing!

but seriously how does this not support 16 bit?

+1

+1

I'm waiting for it, huge CPUs, huge data transfers, HUGE AdobeRGB gamut monitors... and POOOR Software to work with it.

Need 16 bits!!! I'm working on a document using 16 bit images of a model and would like to retain the 16 bit output for the final print!!! Add this feature please. Actually can't believe it converts images to 8 bit!!!

Agree ...!!