AF101 Sky Banding

[mistral13]

banding is an 8-bit lo-noise issue.

At least someone who agrees… cuz that's what I said in the first place ;-) No need to tweak your settings for hours and hours, you'll get banding in skies on an 8-bit camera, no matter what…
The only time I managed to avoid that problem (that was on 8-bit 16/9 SD video) I used a secondary (in Apple Color) to grade the sky, and added blur on the sec., added some grain and then rendered in 10-bit.

 

[electricpig]

If you go from subtle blue to very, very subtle blue across a distance of an HD image, the amount of steps to describe that can be very small, single figures even.
4 times the amount of steps for 10 bit, infinite for float, everything else pitched in the middle

add noise or 'dithering' and the issue will mostly go away.
People obsess with lo-noise settings, compression removes noise, and then banding becomes an issue.

 

[Bern Caughey]

If you go from subtle blue to very, very subtle blue across a distance of an HD image, the amount of steps to describe that can be very small, single figures even.

The blue channel is the weakest in all Bayer Filter array sensors.