Specific Need help fixing color banding in this pic

[ranasrule23]

Greetings,
I think just from looking at the picture you can see that there is are two vertical bands in which the colors are lighter than they should be. I was hoping that could be fixed. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Babine]

 

[ranasrule23]

View attachment 98727

Thanks a million. Looks great.

 

[Rich54]

Gary... excellent job. How did you do it? I spent 10 minutes on this experimenting with different approaches but I couldn't do it.

 

[Babine]

Thanks a million. Looks great.

Yur very welcome.

 

[Babine]

Gary... excellent job. How did you do it? I spent 10 minutes on this experimenting with different approaches but I couldn't do it.

I firstly made a refined selection of the lightning and copied it to a separate layer above. Then, on the layer below, used a BG coloured gradient to somewhat match the original. In places where the banding was still visible or the coloring didn't match, I used a cloud brush in the colour of that area and blurred that layer to suit. After reactivating the lightning layer, I placed a copy of it over-top in soft-light mode which softened the edges.

HTH

Cheers.