Mountain-Light
Landscape and Wildlife Photography
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This image has been posterized. The histogram shows the lines ending in spikes. Looking closely at it, it's evident that either levels or curves was used in some areas to add contrast - but it was overly done. The image doesn't look right.
Porterization
Any process which "stretches" the histogram has the potential to cause the image to look unnatural because only a limited number of tones are available for the image.
This can be caused by techniques such as levels and curves in Photoshop, or by converting an image from one colour space into another as part of colour management.
Useful Tips
Using images with 16-bits per channel can greatly reduce the risk of posterization since this provides up to 256 times as many colour levels as 8-bit.
Even if your original image was 8-bits per channel, performing all editing in 16-bit mode will nearly eliminate posterization caused by rounding errors.
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