I made a gradient area in local correction and applied exposxure correction (only slight). The correction is not smooth but has visible stripes. Am I doing something wrong or is it really an error?
IMG_1245.JPG.dop (7.7 KB)
I am not a DxO employee, just a user. The photo you started with has a couple of issues that make it difficult for PL to process. One, it appears to be stitched from two or more original photos. Two, all of the Exif info is gone - nothing about the camera, lens, or exposure info remains in the original jpeg. I could be wrong on the stitching but I find the dark line at the bottom left edge difficult to account for any other way, plus other hints.
I see from downloading the original image and your .dop sidecar that the only local adjustment is a gradient filter applied from the left side in, apparently to darken the sky on the left side. Now, when I remove the local adjustments completely, the visible stripes are still there, showing that they were generated by something else. Removing the ClearView setting seems to reduce this effect.
One of the ways that ClearView operates is on contrast and microcontrast; it will exaggerate any contrast effects that are already there, such as sensor dust or other defects in the photo. Just for grins, I played with the contrast sliders and the stripe defects in the photo become obvious if they are moved toward maximum. Also, using just control points, the sky on the left can be darkened much more effectively – using a grad filter darkens everything.
Since this image is stitched from others, perhaps the thing to do is create a sequence of already corrected photos and stitch from those.
Finally, you are probably aware that PL does not perform its best unless you start with raw images - it really does not do all that well on already converted jpeg images. It’s not bad, but for purely jpeg work, other programs do better.
I’d try to redo the test with a 16 bit tiff file instead of working on a 8 bit jpeg…