Eldar said:
OK Jon, I´ll give you an example. I´d be happy to see your response. I´m on vacation up the northwest coast and shot this for an HDR series. It is deliberately 3 stop under exposed. I have attached the original image, one lifted 3 stops and one small crop. Below is also the dropbox link to the RAW-file. Feel free to download and play around with it.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/n32t5ic9o7yfadl/_23A1096.CR2?dl=0
Thanks again for the file. I am happy that there doesn't seem to be a hint of banding there. I think that is the first time I've ever seen a Canon file without banding. It may still be there deeper in the shadows, but in this image, it's not, and that is definitely an improvement. I cannot lift shadows three stops on my 5D III most of the time without banding.
The data still has Canon's classic color blotch, sadly. I don't know what gives rise to that exactly. I was able to clean it up with 85 color smoothing and 35 color noise reduction. That takes the wind out of the rest of the colors a bit, so the rock face is less lively.
There is still something "rough" about Canon's random noise. Something I don't see in Sony's. I am guessing that is simply because the noise levels are higher, some ~3e- vs. ~13e-?
Anyway, it's an improvement over it's predecessors for sure.
The attached image is 50% downsampled, and is with +3 exp, +40 shadows, -100 highlights, -70 whites, as well as curves of +20 highlight, +40 white, -30 shadow, -5 black. Upped clarity to +33, saturation to +15.