Camera Profile color rendition in highlights - rings around the sun

Question

i It's a repost from the Labs forum. Since it's closed now, and I have an unanswered post from Thomas Knoll, I'll repost it here.
I took one of those hard scenes for Lightroom - a sunrise - to see how it handles color and highlight rendition around the sun. I alway loved how Capture One was able to render a soft, almost film-like, roll-off in such scenes, where Lightroom/ACR often created multi-level rings around the sun.
The test: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3146/2720834788_3662267c60_o.png
Lightroom's color almost exactly matches Nikon's, but the way the highlights are rendered around the sun... well, you see.
I have tried to play with the settings in LR (recovery, curves) but couldn't repair it while retaining overall color and tone. Tried the Profile Editor: kinda could hide the rings by setting the lightness of the appropriate color to about 10 (saturation didn't help), but that made the image a little darker too. Compensated with the tone curve - worked well, but other images (with colors other than orange, like in this one) were a little "broken".
So, the profiles a little beta indeed.
P.S. Btw, the base curve of Nikon's camera matching profiles (see in the screenshot) looks a little strange with the highlight almost under the ceiling. Canon's base curves look more common.
b Thomas Knoll:
Which profile are you using? (If not the Adobe Standard, how does that handle this image?)

Answer 1

Some feedback on the profiles in Lightroom for my EOS 30D ...
I'm also finding banding around bright suns and in sunsets with Lightroom.
I get the banding in different variations with all the different profiles in Lightroom: Adobe Standard, ACR 4.4, Camera Standard, Faithful and Neutral.
Here is a side by side comparison with the outputs from Canon DPP (Digital Photo Professional) and Canon RIT (Raw Image Task):
http://davidnaylor.org/temp/Highlight-banding-comparison-side-by-side.png
Here is the same comparison as a PSD file with layers (so you can toggle visibility to see the differences more easily):
http://davidnaylor.org/temp/Highlight-banding-comparison-layers.psd
The fall-off around the sun is much more natural using both Canon's DPP and RIT. I'd say the banding is worst using ACR 4.4, but the other Adobe profiles also produce a sharp yellow circle around the sun which looks pretty ugly.
Also, I'm surprised that the camera matching profiles in Lightroom aren't closer to the DPP picture styles than they are. I was under the impression they were visibly identical.
This comparison was made with all the default settings used, i.e. brightness 50, contrast 25, medium contrast tone curve in Lightroom and contrast and saturation at 0 in DPP and RIT. White balance "as shot" in all apps.
Here is the raw original:
http://davidnaylor.org/temp/07463.cr2