Ricoh GR and seemingly compression artefacts in the sky

[kennylovrin]

The exported tiff image looks much better indeed. But then it's 10x bigger.
So if this is a jpeg compression effect, it would have shown up with every (digital) camera I might have used to shoot those pictures?

if i understand you correctly, then yes.
as far as i know (without being an expert ) what happens is that the color tones comes so close to each other that the jpeg compression removes some of them to save file size (which essentially is the point of jpeg), and when it then tried to decompress it for rendering it will produce this banding as it no longer has enough information to really produce the exact tone needed for the gradient.

adding noise/grain though is seemingly quite effective to remove the banding, but on the other hand it might be undesirable in photography..

 

[silent1]

Color space can definitely produce banding. Also what jpeg quality were you shooting in? Raising it to the highest quality can help reduce the banding, as well as editing in 16 bit or higher and dropping it back down to 8 bit for exporting to post online.

I was shooting RAW+. I guess that would generate a raw file as well as a L jpeg (the highest quality), but I have to check the manual on that. Anyway the size of the two images, raw and jpg, are the same, so I would assume that the jpeg generated in RAW+ mode is the highest quality one.

 

[BLKRCAT]

Color space can definitely produce banding. Also what jpeg quality were you shooting in? Raising it to the highest quality can help reduce the banding, as well as editing in 16 bit or higher in your post processor and dropping it back down to 8 bit for exporting to post online.

Take a look here - http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/posterization.htm

Sorry I think I am going to disagree with you. I work in the VFX industry and thought that maybe my knowledge of color space was different from the photo world. It appears to be the same.

I think you are confusing color space with bit rate. An 8 bit image, typically jpgs, will produce banding and artifacts like this not only because of compression but because an 8bit image only has 256 colors that the computer can show at once.

Moving up to the RAW files where they are usually 32 bit you have millions of colors available to display hence why your gradient's are smoother. The computer doesnt have to pick between colors. It's almost like rounding numbers between colors.

Exporting to 16bit PNG should solve your problem. Tiffs will also solve this too but I'm not a huge fan of Tiffs.

If you want to smooth out an 8bit image with banding try adding some noise in photoshop. You might be pleasantly surprised.