65K color gradients?

[gcrasher]

I'm trying to draw some smooth gradient images for a pocket pc but since its 65k colors only it ends up doing a nearest color sort of thing to my jpgs. Is there a way to take an 8 bit per pixel image and dither it down to a 65k color palatte? I know it won't do a perfect gradient at that color depth but I'm wondering if photoshop can do some sort of optimization for 65k colors.

 

[MindBender]

Interesting problem... I think what I would do is set your monitor to 16bit depth so you can get an aproximation of what your final effect will be, then you can try to clean up your banding by tweaking your color choices. I believe there is a dither checkbox that you can tick in your gradient options, that might help. Another little trick that often works to difuse banding when working in print that might help here is to add 1-2% of gaussian, monochromatic noise to the gradient. This is like doing a manual dithering on the gradient.

Hope that helps.