Im wondering if there is any way to rid this image of this weird digital "noise""banding" to left side of this image? I have attached the edited and unedited image. The images are slightly censored aswell fyi. I shot this image at 200 iso. I spend a decent time editing these and when I exported the finished images and added a bit of grain to them these looked really bad around those shadowy areas.
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Examing the OP's LrC Develop settings the Blacks have been set to +86, which is going to raise the black level and the Tone Curve has the highlight enpoint dragged to 255/236, which will limit the maximum brightness on the image. In addition there are some very heavy color setings applied in the Calibration panel along with the HSL and Color Grading panels. In general the Calibration panel settings should only be used to "correct" the color rendering of the camera profile as a "calibration" setting and not a "creative" setting. These all add up towards creating the type of issues the OP is seing along with what I already mentioned ( Luminace NR and Display Calibration settings).
Certainly. I investigated a bit further and I think now these are actually jpeg compression artefacts. I don't see the issue in tiff exports as much. Still a bit of mottled appearancwe but that might just be the background itself. Here is a 1500 pixels long side sRGB export quality 75 from the ARW file. You might need to click to zoom:
Here it is in tiff:
If you taste hoverover the blocky artefacts, you see single bit steps in the color values. I am guessing that this will get worsened by adding grain as the jpeg algorithm has a lot of trouble accurately encoding random noise. You can see this very well in the Dinal-G2.jpg file. The noise is posterized in that. Interestingly, the effect actually gets worse if you optimize the noise reduction in the orginal. I played a little and set masking in sharpening to 42 and noise reduction to 23. Here is a 75% quality sRGB jpeg export:
Very clear posterization. The steps are single bits again.
The same file exported to tiff doesn't show this:
If you export to qualities much higher (95 and up) you don't see these blocky areas and the result is close to the tif export. You get the same posterization problem if you run the image through Topaz denoise AI and export to 75% sRGB jpeg:
The original tiff coming from Topaz is completely clean.
So this appears to be a problem with jpeg compression interacting with subtle gradients that is just a few bits. Jpeg export from a 16-bit prophotoRGB tiff (which looks normal in Photoshop) from Photoshop at 75% gives the same result with the posterized shadows. Fix is, like in Lightroom Classic, to increase jpg quality.
"You can see this very well in the Dinal-G2.jpg file. The noise is posterized in that."
Jao still not seeing any posterization or stairstep artifacts in your posted screenshots or the original DinaIG-2.jpg file. Do you see posterization in your screenshots in the above post? Can you upload the screenshots to a file sharing site so I can see them the same as you without the forum interface. The below screenshot is the DinaIG-2.jpg file in PS with +2EV Exposure applied at 200%. No posterization on my system and no stepping when using the Eyedropper with Point Sample setting. Do you see posterization in the below screenshot. There's something else going on. I'm on Windows 10 and both you and the OP are using Mac systems so it appears to be a Mac only issue.
I see clear noise quantization in the dinal screenshot you show. The noise seems to come in only a few discrete levels, especially visible in the top left corner. You also see some wormy artifacts in the noise all around. The latter is likely due to the jpeg compression. The blocky artifacts in my screen shots that I can clearly see are simply jpeg compression induced and are completely expected and not avoidable. Nothing to do with Mac or PC. If you want to take a look at the screenshots directly, click on them and download them from the zoomed in view. That will give you the original screenshot files. This artifact is simply a consequence of the JPEG compression algorithm. You should be able to see them on your screen too! Here is the above screenshot with outlined where it is particularly visible. Note, this is quite subtle! You should see blocky stair cases.
Here is the jpeg export amplified using levels in Photoshop and scaled up 200% to show you the blocky artifacts:
You should see posterization and blocky artifacts clearly now.
8-bit sRGB TIFF export with the same adjustment layer:
No blocky artifacts and no real staircasing. The mottling you see is undoubtedly just the actual surface of the background behind the model.
Again, the jpeg algorithm is well known to do this. Only thing to do about it is to increase the quality setting. Most of the time it is not visible and indeed this time it is very subtle and only if you look hard is it there.
Oh and last but not least, Here is the screenshot of the dinalG-2 file zoomed and amplified to show you thee jpeg compression artifacts are also present in the file with added grain. Again, completely expected. I can see these blocks and stringy/wormy artifacts in the file without the curves amplification.
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