Ecroche Test Render

So I've been dealing with some issues getting my color maps to render properly using RenderMan with Maya. Several tutorials later the main trick seems to be "linearize sRGB" (I hope to take more time to write more about this later.) Then I bring the render into photo shop to clean it up a bit, only to find that Photoshop is making an ugly banded mess of the gradients in the back ground of the render. A few more tutorials and help forums later, I cannot find a solid answer to this issue even though it seems to be a pretty universal issue. The best solution I can find is to add noise, &/or to convert the image to a 16 bit image. I had limited success with both of these options.