I've used Photoshop for a variety of things over the years, but never for photography...

Currently I'm working on terrain height maps for a video game(Sims 3, Create-a-World). 16 bit grayscale png is the format. I generate the height map in another program and then refine the resultant png in Photoshop. I make extensive use of B&W gradients and selection tools to fade from one elevation to another on the maps.

I've noticed that while the gradients produced by Photoshop are of excellent quality, the ones I generate with the Eye Candy 6 'Gradient Glow' plug-in always have banding resulting in very discernible steps on my terrain and need to be blended first with a Gaussian blur to be usable.

While Eye Candy claims this filter is 16 bit compatible, I'm dubious that is using more than 8 bits during generation.

I'm just wondering if anyone else has a better solution than blurring?

Thanks