Deep Blue Banding Yuck

We take beautiful blue skies for granted. Once we bring the picture into a computer and prepare it for sale, a despicable little anomaly often shows up: Banding.

Some shoot it in Raw. Then they open at 16-Bit. That helps a great deal. However, when you apply noise removal techniques or maybe some vignette effects on the edges, there's almost no way around it. Moreover, if you need to upload it as a JPG, you will need to convert it to 8-Bit anyway.

The picture at left had a convenient billboard in the corner. So I brought in some new clouds to cover it (pulled from another shot and other areas in the same photo). Pushed in some edges with a layer mask. Then some fiddling with Selective Color. It's not perfect. Yet, it looks better.

That's the job of a photo retoucher: Make good pictures look their best.