Chromatic aberration (a.k.a 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/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 for fixing chromatic aberration such as lens correction tool in Photoshop/lightroom, plugins etc. However, those techniques hardly work for all photographs.
Here is an example of color fringing
Here I am giving you a step by step guide on how to fix this aberration using a method which 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
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 the chromatic aberration from your images.
What is your method of removing chromatic aberration? Do share it with us.
