Post Production: Chromatic Aberration

Chromatic Aberration beyond just sounding really cool, can add an extra layer of reality to your images. Strangely, photographers and camera engineers do everything in their power to avoid this imperfection in photographs.

Chromatic Aberration adds a fringe of red, green and/or blue onto the edges of your image. It may also add a slight blur to this edging. (In fact, Chromatic Aberration can occur in Black and white photography, manifesting itself as a blurry edge since there is no RGB channel on those images). In a nut shell, it happens when the lenses that make up the camera mechanism cannot converge the colour wavelengths properly and the image isnt produced properly (thus blurry – and out of synch).

A word of warning, don’t overdo it. The blurry edges can make the image look out of focus – clients hate that. Used in moderation (I’m still learning here to) it can really look great.

In Photoshop, do the following:

Duplicate the layer

Select Filter from the menu

Select Distort > Lens Correction

Pull the Fix Red/Cyan Fringe (or Blue/Yellow) to your liking and click OK

Use erase tool to delete most of the central part of the area or specific areas that don’t need to look ‘fringed’ to death.

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