Lens construction can cause unwanted color fringes to appear in your images. These effects are technically known as chromatic aberration, which happens when a lens refracts multiple wavelengths of light at different amounts. This video demonstrates how to remove distracting chromatic aberrations or other color fringes, and how to balance the edge removal effects you apply.

Photo: Hatice Lance

Transcript

Chromatic Aberration Correction

Chromatic aberration correction directly addresses color fringing that typically appears from lens construction. When adjusting color fringing issues, zoom in to at least a 100% view. Also, look for a place in the frame with a high contrast edge near the corner.

Each supported lens will have a selectable chromatic aberration profile. The profiles are designed to handle the primary aberrations each lens creates. However, to dial the look with more precision, manual adjustments provide more tools for minimizing fringe issues.

The Blue and Red color sliders can be adjusted to reduce color fringing. If you see purple or lime green fringes, adjust the Blue slider. Adjust Red when you see red or cyan fringing. More often than not, only the first two sliders are needed.

The two Corner color sliders enable you to increase or decrease the strength of each correction in each corner.

Lens correction settings can be saved as a preset. The preset will include all settings on the panel – distortion, vignette, and chromatic aberration correction. Just use the gear icon at the top of the panel.

Color Fringe Correction

Chromatic aberration automatically handles the most common fringing issues, but color fringes can widely vary from image to image. The Defringe panel provides additional control over removing color fringes.

Defringing targets colors that are left over after chromatic aberration correction has been applied. Chromatic aberration can also be removed with this panel, which is a great option for unsupported lenses. Simply set the defringe parameters to match the color fringes in the photo.

Color fringes can be removed from the edges of all colors at once, or for more control, each color hue and range can be set individually. Simply select a specific fringe color, then adjust the controls.

As with the Lens Correction Panel, you can save the settings on the Defringe panel as a preset by clicking the gear icon.