pfredd

The banding has the fingerprint angle of stitching. Cure is, as mentioned above, smudging OK in bland no detail areas like sky, NG in detailed areas.
Prevention is shoot full manual so matching margin colours are same. Because of the slash angle polarizers don't work smooth either.
Another cause is often lens distortion (not aberration) which can be easily removed in good editing software unless the lens is off brand.

ziggykor Loc: East Texas

"Here's an image that I processed from 5 images. The images were processed in raw using sync.
Anyone know why there are "lines" in the sky??"


First, I suspect that the banding was caused because you used SYNC in RAW before you Merged to HDR. If you're going to perform a merge to HDR directly from Camera RAW do nothing in RAW until after the merge is finished. By using SYNC you've essentially made all the images the same, loosing the changes made by working through the exposure sequence.

The other issue mentioned was the light colored bands around the edges of the rocks that look like chromatic aberations. Sometimes these can actually be caused by using to great a clarity value, although clarity in excess will most often cause an obvious white halo around the edges.

Do your tone-mapping in Elements, then use Save not Save As. This will place your image back into ACR and you can edit just like it's a RAW file.

rambler Loc: Masssachusetts

You did not have a circular polarizing filter attached, did you?

greymule Loc: Colorado

Yes, I did.

greymule Loc: Colorado

Monsieur Lobos-

I re-did the image. In the final dialog box in HDR, there is a box "remove ghosts" which I checked.

It seemed to take care of both the sky banding and the CA-like color aberrations.

Here is the re-do.

Thanks again for your kind assistance. You da man.

Rick