In the past, I've typically shot on white or black paper backgrounds or on location. I recently shot a project on thunder grey seamless paper for a client. During my retouch, I'm noticing banding (or what I guess may be called posterization) around the gradations of the lighting around the model. I've tried many different things to get rid of it including not using plugins and changing GPU settings on Photoshop (from advanced to basic).
Here's my workflow:
1. RAW processing via Capture One 8
2. Exporting RAW as 16-bit TIFF (no sharpening) in Prophoto RGB
3. Making edits (when using any plugins, I have masked out the background to make sure an 8bit plugin isn't affecting the background)
3a: plugins used Imagenomic Portraiture and RadLab, plus Nik Software for output sharpening
4. Reduce size and output sharpen
5. Save for web
Here's the RAW (saved for web)
Here's the processed RAW saved from a TIFF for the web:
Here's the retouched image, saved for the web:
It's hard to truly illustrate it how it looks on my iMac. But if you focus your eyes to look for the rainbow like ring, you'll be able to see the jagged edges where there isn't smooth transition in the gradients and you'll see some colored posterization streaks within it. I tried blurring but it just gets worse. Any solutions or any idea where this comes from?
All photos from my shoot were shot at 1/160 shutter, f/11 aperature, and 100 ISO on a Canon 5D MKIII tethered to Capture One 8.
Thanks!