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Can someone explain why dark areas have banding after I click open from camera raw? (See sky in second picture compared to first). Both are on 16bits/channel.
If it's a 16 bit file, any banding is always in the display system, not in the image data. If changing the monitor profile has no effect, try to turn off GPU in Photoshop preferences, or set it to "Basic" mode.
Keep in mind that a standard display pipeline is 8-bit, and close tonalities like here only have so many discrete values to distribute. I'm told that Lightroom uses dithering to break up banding in 8 bit output, so maybe ACR does too.
In most circumstances ACR should be much more susceptibl
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Have you tried recalibrating your monitor? The colors look a bit different between the two screenshots, which can indicate a broken monitor profile.
I'm not seeing any banding (this 8-bit jpeg may show some slight banding of equal amounts) between ACR and Ps at my end.
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I messed with the calibration and it helped a bit but the gradient is much worse in the second photo after I open it from Camera Raw which makes it difficult to edit as I think it's gonna look good and I open it and the sky looks awful.
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Set your monitor profile (system settings, not in Ps) to sRGB (or Adobe RGB if you happen to have a wide gamut monitor). See if that helps. Do you have a hardware calibration unit such as the ColorMunki or SpyderPro?
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It's defaulted to sRGB
Also, that may be so but doesn't explain why the camera raw photo looks different when I click open
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I suspect this is a combination of different things. One of them is a very shallow gradient with close tonalities.
The monitor profile is a crucial link in the color management chain. The image data are converted into the monitor profile by the application, and if something goes wrong in that conversion - maybe because the profile isn't written strictly to specification - anything can happen. Quite frequently different applications handle a "marginal" profile in different ways, one application may accept it but another may choke on it.
Also, although it all ends up in the same monitor profile, the source profiles may be different, and so the conversion math is different. This is the case with ACR (gamma 1.0 ProPhoto), vs. Photoshop (gamma 2.2 sRGB, Adobe RGB, or 1.8 ProPhoto).
In Photoshop, the display color management is executed in the GPU at default settings. Setting it to "Basic" shifts it back to the CPU which is more robust and reliable.
All of this is why reprofiling your display is always the very first step in any color troubleshooting. This is why you want to have a calibrator. If you don't, sRGB is usually a safe fallback, even though it's not entirely accurate.
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If it's a 16 bit file, any banding is always in the display system, not in the image data. If changing the monitor profile has no effect, try to turn off GPU in Photoshop preferences, or set it to "Basic" mode.
Keep in mind that a standard display pipeline is 8-bit, and close tonalities like here only have so many discrete values to distribute. I'm told that Lightroom uses dithering to break up banding in 8 bit output, so maybe ACR does too.
In most circumstances ACR should be much more susceptible to these problems than Photoshop, simply because the conversion from linear gamma ProPhoto (into the monitor profile) is a much more complex conversion than from a standard gamma 2.2 color space.
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@D Fosse I changed to ProPhoto and changed my native monitor settings to sRGB and it helped a lot. Still notice a difference but I think it's due to how I edit now and not the display. Thanks
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Just as a reminder - When editing images in a profile other than sRGB, the files to be used for web and non color managed programs will need to be converted to sRGB.
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As I can see in camera raw , you've set contrast -38 and shadows -60
it may also be part of the trouble you're facing, cuz these too are working against each other, you're taking out the contrast then adding it manually with shadow point controller.