Chromatic Aberration

This is an image taken with a Canon G9 and suffered from some pretty bad chromatic aberration in the high contrast areas of the leaves. You can see it in the image below. The purple and red coloring around the edges of the leaves is really unacceptable in a good shot. So what causes chromatic aberration?

This shot was at 1/200 at f/4 which really was too wide of an aperture for the conditions. Anyhow when an aperture is at its lowest, or widest opening, more of the lens is being used to expose the sensor. As the light hits the outer portion of the lens it can refract at slightly different angles. This changes the alignment of the light photons being absorbed by the sensor buckets and spreads the colors slightly. Fortunately we have a couple of sliders in Lightroom that works on these two issues.

Making a very slight adjustment with these sliders results in a much cleaner image when it comes to chromatic aberration. Here is a screen capture of this same image after the adjustments.

The lens has a lot to do with the amount of chromatic aberration you may get. Obviously if you avoid high contrast images, you can reduce the effect. True but not realistic. One of the fixes is to realize the limitation of your lens and work around it. Like I said above this shot was at 1/200 and f/4, I could have shot it at 1/60th and f/7.1 for the same exposure but i would have used less of the lens and thus probably would not have had to post correct the aberration.

That pretty much does it for today so take care.


Cya... Doug


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