Yes, a good read and useful links.
Joel Tjintjelaar is doing some wonderful work.
The disadvantage of his method of applying strong gradients is that you get banding in the print which is not easily visible on screen. For what it's worth I use a solar curve to find the problem areas (see screen shot below). It's easy to set up as an action. I turn off the layers below the solar curve until banding disappears to find the culprit. It will be one of the masks.
To deal to the banding in CS6 and above you can set up dithering in the mask options, but for those of us using CS5, just applying a little gaussian noise to the mask usually does the trick. 2.4% is mostly enough. I check for this now as a matter of course with all images.
David
