Hey,
Why does my Bumpmap looks that awefull and stepped?
It looks so well in greyscale, but when I applie it … it is unuseable 
Any Idea how I can get rid of this?
it may resolution, it calculates from pixels, try to increase resolution,
you can try texture settings like cubic or samart, and maybe non color setting.
And what you mean by “apply it”? Bake?
The Resolution ist 4096x4096
And I already tried all those settings you mentioned to No effect.
By applied I mean plugged in a bump map node and than into normal.
The problem here is that your texture doesn’t have sufficient depth in the color information…
You should use textures with 32-bit floats.
You might want to convert the texture to 32bit, and maybe apply some blur to smooth the gradient steps.
4 Likes
Sorry to hear
Agree with Secrop; 32bit and blur, possibly a smaller image will suffice. Also, does the bump settings even make sense? Plug it into a displacement node instead (temporarily) using adaptive subdivision. Whatever number you plug into Displacement Scale is what you should use for Bump Distance (keep strength at 1, at least initially). The default of 1 (meter between black and white) wouldn’t make sense on something like a leaf; maybe a centimeter or two for main deformation, and less than a millimeter for internal branches etc.