Is this an M9 smearing or banding or just a mess?

[raid]

The banding in the first two also curves with the radius of the sun, which to me seems that perhaps it's more of the ability of the camera to render all the tones than something technically wrong with the sensor. I would think tech problems would occur in more straight lines with the sensor matrix.

The M9 does not seem to match Velvia 50. I have been spoiled for so many years by Fujichrome 50 film. With the M9, it could be the limited capabilities to capture all tones, as you have said.

 

[Rob-F]

I would describe what I see on my 21.5 inch iMac as a "mottled" look. And in the upper left area, it looks layered. I have seen clouds take on a similar appearance at times. It's a little hard to be sure these are not clouds; but if they were, they ought to reflecting the light of sunset, rather than appearing dark. It seems to have been taken less than one minute after the first shot, which at first i thought looked fine; on closer inspection, I seem to see it there too, faintly. So I think there is something going on, there. I don't know about the underexposure explanation. It seems properly exposed for a sunset.

 

[raid]

This is the first time where I am bothered by it, Rob. I have niticed many times digital "paintings" in the sky during sunsets. It looks as if soneone took a paint brush and painted over the sky some strokes. I expose sunsets the way I have done with slide film.

 

[Doug]

These are definitely jpeg artifacts. It can be fixed in Photoshop, but might be easier to control in lightroom with some settings when you export the jpeg.

Are you seeing the banding when you look at the images in lightroom?

BTW, email on the way with the photoshop fix for this.

for anyone else interested, I found this tutorial that is worthwhile to watch.

https://fstoppers.com/post-production/learn-how-fix-color-banding-using-just-one-simple-tool-7946

Raid, I agree with Chris... my first impression was of artifacts from jpeg compression. Such a soft smooth gradual transition in color and brightness is where these compression artifacts are most visible.

Working with TIFF files exported from LR, I then scale to the size I want, sharpen a bit, add a black line border, and Save-As in jpeg format for upload. In this final step my program has a slider to control the amount of jpeg compression and consequent filesize. The compression scale goes from 0 (most compression) to 100 (no compression), and I avoid any compression below 60 as more likely to display artifacts. I have not tried to use LR for this, but it may have the same ability.

 

[raid]

Hi Doug,
I will look at any settings in LR5 to control the compression.

 

[jaapv]

I shoot always DNG files. Then I use LR5 or CS2 to get the jpg files.I just checked, and the M9 is set to uncompressed DNG.

When you are using CS2 make sure that you set the bit depth to 16 and the colour space to Adobe RGB |(the little blue clickable text under your image in ACR), never drop down to sRGB unless you absolutely have to. 8-bit processing is sure to produce posterizing LR will handle this automatically for you (in Prophoto)
And upgrade to at least CS5, as the raw algorithms have been vastly improved.

 

[raid]

I have CS5 at work and CS2 and LR5 at home.
Thanks for the tips. I will make sure to choose bit depth 16.