It is amazing how often Chromatic Aberration (CA) shows up in my images. I think this is just a testament to how hard the high resolution digital sensors push our modern optics. And I have the best Nikkor glass available - all pro fixed and zoom lenses. So it isn't as if my lenses are sub par. At right is an image that needed some help in the CA department.

The reality is that Chromatic Aberration is easily fixed in Lightroom. The latest CA tools in version 1.4.1 and the Version 2.0 Beta are more than sufficient to remove even the worst CA issues. You can check out my previous Chromatic Aberration blog posts here and here.

I applied the following amounts of CA correction to this image (see image settings at right) - mostly it is visible on the right side of the tunnel wall where the contrast is the greatest. Also, this image was shot with a 17-35 mm wide-angle lens which is par for the course for wide angles that usually tend to show more CA than other lenses. But if you look closely, especially on high contrast images that were backlit you'll most likely see CA with any lens.

Every once in a while an image has green color fringing instead of just red or blue fringing. This is because there are both red and blue fringing in the same location and hence the colors have mixed to give us green. Taking out this type of aberration (or any fringing where the colors have mixed) can be tricky. But lucky for us the engineers at Adobe have thought of this issue and have provided us with a simple way to take care of it.

Here are examples of before and after removing the CA from this BMX image. The top is before and the bottom is after.

By holding down the Option (alt on PC) key while adjusting the CA sliders Lightroom will show you just the colors that are affected with that one slider, hence only Red/Cyan or Blue/Yellow. This allows you to adjust the sliders for each color independently and remove CA a little faster. Granted using the CA sliders can be a little complicated and it definitely takes some getting used to. But once you get the hang of these there won't be many situations that you can't correct.

In my experience though, Nikon's Capture NX has the best CA reduction tool I have ever seen. You simply just turn it on and it removes all CA from the image. It couldn't be simpler than that! I wish Adobe could get a hold of their algorithms so it could be that simple but I am not holding my breath.

That's it for this session. See you next week.

Adios, Michael