Banding when exporting photo (NOT a JPEG artefact)
Before requesting support from C1 I'd like to verify whether there's something known here. In short, this photo looks perfectly fine in the C1 editor, but when exported a very evident banding artefact is produced. Note that this happens with TIFF too, so it's not a JPEG compression issue.
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It indeed looks like a compression issue. TIFF 8-bit or 16-bit?
Try exporting with hardware acceleration disabed.
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It looks like (actually I originally thought it was a JPEG problem), but it isn't. It's TIFF 16-bit, ZIP (lossless), confirmed by EXIF data (Compression: Deflate). I'm always working with hw acceleration disabled because it causes a number of issues (which is already a problem because of low performance, but I'll deal with it later).
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Partially fixed. It was an output profile problem: with ProPhoto the banding doesn't appear.
This solves the problem for a portion of outputs, but not for sRGB outputs, which I use for my website.
Which leads to a broadening of the topic. Already years ago I evaluated the use of wider profiles (of course not ProPhoto which is not for rendering, but something better than sRGB) for publishing to the web, but some popular browsers were broken with profiles other than sRGB and I still saw the recommendation of using sRGB for the web. How is the situation today?
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Google Chrome and Safari are color managed browsers. I cannot speak for the Microsoft browser or other 3rd party browsers.
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Usually, you cannot control nor know with what people look your web images. There are not so many monitors out in the wild which can support wide gamut or AdobeRGB. And there are not so many images which actually have colors outside of sRGB. I guess your sample image doesn't. *)
So unless you have an audience with known (to you) hardware, and you know they use color managed browsers, and you have images which really have and benefit from colors outside sRGB, there is not really a benefit going beyond sRGB for your web images. Imho.
So, I suggest JPG sRGB for your website.
*) However, if you know a good Windows software which shows you the gamut of different color spaces (of your choice) and all colors of your own image (of choice) in 3D space, please let me know.
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Yes, I know that the casual visitor has probably the monitor totally uncalibrated, so I'm only thinking of people who are at least a bit educated about colour settings. The idea is at least to avoid that a non sRGB image is rendered in a way that is completely dull — maybe setting an option so sRGB images are served by default, and ones with a wider profile upon request, via a preference. But actually, being this just a hobby, it would probably require a disproportionate effort. At least now, maybe things will change in the near future with HDR monitors. Who knows.
I don't know anything about colour and Windows — I seldom use Windows when required by some software project customer.
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I did a bit of research and I'd like to share what is my current understanding of the topic, also recapping what has been said earlier in this thread.
1. Two different sets of target users must be considered: those unaware of colour calibration and/or with poor monitors and/or old browsers and all the others (amateurs/professionals with decent/good monitor, calibration, and recent browsers).
2. The former group requires sRGB to avoid major rendering problems.
3. The latter group would for sure benefit from a larger target colour space, and DCI-P3 could be a good pick.
4. CSS can be easily used to serve different contents (either sRGB or DCI-P3) in function of the browser capabilities. Of course this requires to export two versions of each image.
5. DCI-P3 might require more than 8-bit files to avoid banding. This leads to the problem of browser supporting file formats more advanced than JPG allowing more than 8-bits per pixel. HEIC does, but today it's basically supported only by Safari. AVIF (up to 12-bits per pixel) seems better:
https://caniuse.com/?search=AVIF
With the proper software tools it's possible to detect whether the browser supports it.
6. At this point the thing is doable; it's a matter to decide whether it's worth while the effort. Personally, I'm an amateur without even a specific desire to “emerge” (my website is for me and a circle of friends), so it would not change much. The software engineer that is in me, on the other hand, is tempted to try a hack.
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