I've found some really nice color ramps for portraying rasters, but in ArcGIS and QGIS, they don't seem to be easily usable for a finished product because their complexity causes obvious steps rather than a smooth gradient. The raster renderer appears to be stuck at an 8-bit palette (only 256 levels), rather than a mathematical transform involving 24-bit standard RGB or deep 48-bit RGB.
There's probably an awkward workaround involving splitting up the raster into multiple layers and symbolizing them separately, but I'd like to know which desktop and web GIS systems can present stretched/colorized gradients like this natively in a higher precision format.