What Chromatic Aberration Is and How to Fix It

Chromatic aberration is an extremely common problem in photography that affects many lenses. This quick and helpful video will show you what it is and how to fix it. 

Coming to you from Michael The Maven, this great video talks about chromatic aberration. Chromatic aberration (also sometimes referred to as "color fringing") is a consequence of dispersion, which refers to the phenomenon of refractive index varying with respect to the wavelength of light. In turn, this causes the lens to be unable to focus all colors of light to the same point, leading to the characteristic green and magenta edges you see around high-contrast edges. This most often appears at wider apertures, particularly with extremely wide-aperture primes and cheaper zoom lenses (and especially with older lenses). The good news is that the vast majority of the time, you can quickly and easily correct chromatic aberration with just a few clicks in Lightroom, and it is rarely bad enough to be a big issue. Nonetheless, you should definitely keep a close eye out for it when you bring photos into post simply to keep your image quality top notch. Check out the video above for the full rundown.

Alex Cooke's picture

Alex Cooke is a Cleveland-based portrait, events, and landscape photographer. He holds an M.S. in Applied Mathematics and a doctorate in Music Composition. He is also an avid equestrian.

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3 Comments

Careful with using the lens correction tool. All that seems to do is simply desaturate those areas which can have really ugly results if it’s not up against a blank white sky. When that happens I use a hue/sat adjustment with painted mask instead and shift the magenta or green fringing color to better match the object and then desaturate from there slightly to blend.

I do the same thing. Recently discovered that method a couple of months ago.

Has anyone else had aberration get worse with lens wear? My 70-200 seems to get it at all apertures now in sunlight, whereas flipping through prior shots, this wasn't the case.
The whites also halo and leak into nearby colors :(...