Remove chromatic aberration with these easy steps using photoshop

Chromatic aberration or color fringing is often a nightmare for photographers. It is seen as a purple or green or cyan fringe around the edges of the photographs where there is  strong backlight or high contrast region. It occurs when light breaks up into its primary components, thus, leaving aberrant colors in these high contrast regions. It is an inherent problem with some lenses and camera. There are plenty of  techniques available to remove chromatic aberration such as lens correction tool in Photoshop or Lightroom, plugins etc. However, those techniques hardly work on most photographs.

Here is an example of color fringing/chromatic aberration

 

Steps to remove Chromatic Aberration

Here, I am giving you a step by step Photoshop tutorial on how to fix chromatic aberration using a method I use.

Step 1. Open the image in Photoshop.

Step 2.  Duplicate the background layer and name it as ‘Chromatic aberration’

Step 3. While the ‘Chromatic aberration’ layer selected, click on Filter –> Blur –> Gaussian Blur

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Step 4. Set your desired radius. I would recommend you to start with a radius of 15.0 (Selection of radius depends on the level of chromatic aberration)

 Step 5. Change the blending mode of the ‘Chromatic aberration’ layer to ‘Color’. This will desaturate the layer.

 Step 6. Now apply a mask to this layer by clicking Layer –> Layer mask –> hide all. This hides the selected layer — ‘Chromatic aberration’

Step 7. Now choose a soft edged brush and set the foreground color to white (as shown in the picture)

Step 8. Choose the brush opacity based on the level of chromatic aberration and carefully paint over the areas of color fringing. You can undo the actions by choosing the foreground color to black.

Step 9. Once you finish the process, right click on the layer mask and click apply mask

Step 10. Now, Right click on the ‘Chromatic aberration’ layer and click flatten image.

Final result

That’s it. This will remove chromatic aberration on your images.

What is your method to remove chromatic aberration? Please share it with us.