Is Nik Dfine the ultimate tool to remove banding?

I'm a landscaper, and I often have to push the shadows in my high contrast photos. Of course, this often results in banding - a well known characteristic issue among Canon's DSLRs.

After reading multiple recommendations on Nik Dfine, I finally pulled the trigger and tried it, and I gotta say that the results are the best I've seen so far! Noise reduction in LR and Photoshop does not even come close to what I get from Nik Dfine. It really kills 90% of the banding! Quite amazing.

But my question.. Is Nik Dfine the best there is?

It's the only noise reduction tool I use. I discovered it when I had the 50D, a notorious banding camera in low light.

Mostly I solved the problem by getting rid of that camera. Now I use it for noise reduction as intended.

I use it too, it's done the best of all the available tools I've used.

I use Topaz and Nik for DeNoise, they both work well, but each one is better at certain things.

For grain I use Topaz and for banding I use Nik.

Examples please. I've been curious about this as well.

Scatterbrained wrote in post #14390529
Examples please. I've been curious about this as well.

The original picture was shown in this posting:

https://photography-on-the.net …p?p=14598865&po​stcount=26

Postprocessing was first done with Dfine, than additional color denoise with Lightroom 4.1 (works well on TIFF an JPEG).

The debanding function from Dfine 2.0 works fine for me on my Canon 7D RAWs in Lightroom, if shadows have to brighten up strongly.

Simon