Thank you for looking in to it. I was already able to get around this by simply turning off lens profile corrections in LR before exporting to Photoshop for blending. Other than that I processed the image in exactly the same way. If you notice in the final image below the banding is gone. The only thing different is lens correction. So with this and the first images in my original post, it appears that lens profile correction is the source of the banding. Different processing definitely helps reduce their visibility, but turning off lens profile correction removes it completely.
That's what I'm so curious about. Why lens correction introduces these artifacts. However I believe in your post #5 you explained well what the profile corrections do to make this happen. Thank you!
Dropbox - _DSC2449-Edit.dng
lukejc1 wrote That's what I'm so curious about. Why lens correction introduces these artifacts. However I believe in your post #5 you explained well what the profile corrections do to make this happen. Thank you! |
It's worth repeating:
With LR default (0) settings applied to your _DSC2463 raw file the sky area has a very small tonal range (i.e. # of pixel data values). When you apply the lens profile it removes vignetting in the sky area reducing the number of tonal values even further. The original raw file linear data has been "stretched" and when you Export the file or use Edit in PS this non-linear data is baked into the image file. When you apply further edits to the TIFF file in LR to darken the sky and add more detail it stretches those tonal data values even further, which can cause visible stair-step banding or posterization.
For best results apply LR edits to the raw file for good highlight & shadow recovery and overall tonal & color rendering as a minimum BEFORE creating the PS TIFF files. Controls such as HSL and Dehaze can also be applied, but then those settings are "baked" into the TIFF file and not so easy to change or remove their effect later. (i.e. destructive editing).
Concerning Lens Profiles
A 100 Lens Profile setting is not the Holy Grail! I have the default settings for all of my lens profiles set to 0 Distortion and 50 Vignetting and only change the settings when there is "visible" vignetting or distortion in the image. There's no "free lunch" here and 100 Vignetting correction can make the image look less "natural" and accentuates corner lens aberrations. Distortion correction stretches and crops the image making it look less "natural" in the case of barrel-distortion. It also affects performance of the Develop module. For landscape photography there's really no need for distortion correction. Give it a try!
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