Panoramic - Bands in the sky

[atbell02]

I just returned from Rome and I took several panos of the Colosseum and the Vatican. They have turned out great except the blue in the sky appears banded. Below is one example of a 7-photo pano from the Colosseum.



http://www.flickr.com/photos/7750391...n/photostream/

I shot in RAW, Manual mode with the following settings for each individual photo:
Shutter: 1/250
Aperature: f/10
ISO: 100
White Balance: Auto (adjusted in PP)

I used Lightroom to make some curve adjustments and of course equate all the white balances. I adjusted one photo then synced the other 6 to the edited one. After, I used Photoshop Photomerge (CS5) to construct the panoramic using JPEGs.

Is there any way to get rid of the wavy bands in the sky? I have double and triple checked all the settings (white balance, exposure settings, etc..) and they are all equal.

Any information would be greatly appreciated!

Anthony

[gjl711]

Looks like you did no blending at all.

[atbell02]

Thanks for the response gjl711!

I have used Photomerge in the past to make some great panos and never had to do anything else. What do you mean by blending?

[gjl711]

Originally Posted by atbell02

Thanks for the response gjl711!

I have used Photomerge in the past to make some great panos and never had to do anything else. What do you mean by blending?

When you do skies especially it really helps to feather the edges heavily. There are no details in the sky to break things up like there is in the building. If you look close, the banding is there as well but really hard to see. With the sky all you have is color and the eye is pretty efficient in spotting different shades. To get rid of this, you can add a layer mast to the layer above the base layer and using the brush tool set rather large at maybe 15% opacity, feather the edges so that the color transition is gentle and not harsh.

[Badger49456]

This happened to me all the time in CS3 when the program would run out of memory to finish the blending. It would merge, but not blend, and I would get a result like yours. If you have that file saved with layers still, try again by going to 'Edit' and then 'Auto Blend Layers.'

[Lowner]

Remove the sky, sample a representative blue you'd be happy with and lay that down as a replacement.

[atbell02]

Problem solved.

I am using my Asus netbook which has 0 power. I guess Photoshop would merge the photos, say they were blending them, then run out of memory and just display the pano un-blended. I had to manually auto-blend the layers.

Thanks to everyone for their responses! I am glad these panos are not ruined.