Working with Grayscale Question

[Mistro]

I create grayscale maps a lot for 3D textures and height maps for terrain. I downloaded a grayscale image from google maps via "Google Maps for Height map". After adjusting the black and white values with levels I exported using "grayscale 16bit" My terrain looks like a pixelated mess. (document is 4096 x 4096)

When I zoom in within Affinity, I notice a lot of banding with the transitions of gray values. Is this banding causing my terrains to render pixelated or am I missing something working with grayscale in Affinity?

[DWright]

Is it possible for you to post a copy of your .afphoto file as it is difficult to see the issue in you screenshot

[Mistro]

Update: Banding was not the problem I found out. I made some progress figuring out why my initial height maps was coming out bad. Turns out when working with 4k images for terrain maps, it's better to have a lot of detail going on in the image so there's more transitioning between values. Adding some noise and blur helps. In fact I ended up creating a height map from a color photo using Substance Sampler and brought it into Affinity to tweak with level adjustments and it came out much better. If I do it all by hand, I now know not to make it "too clean" to avoid wide steps in the gradient from one value to another.

I'm relieved it's not a Affinity issue. Grayscale 16bit exports just fine from what I'm seeing.