Dealing with Purple Fringing

[wulf]

Have you experienced the dreaded purple fringing? Also known as chromatic aberration, this occurs when shooting a subject against strong light. Some lenses are more susceptible than others and it often varies at different focal lengths.

That is particularly true of my 70-300mm lens. Here is a picture I took of a red kite flying near Watlington in Oxfordshire. It was the perfect set up for purple fringing - strong light, small, dark subject and long focal length:



... but where is the purple?

Most image editing programs have a "Hue/Saturation" control and will let you work on different sets of colours independently. For this image (and the one you will see next to it on my Flickr stream), I applied strong desaturation to magenta colours and medium desaturation to blue colours.

The images still have other flaws - not perfectly sharp and the birds are rather dark - but the view is better than I had in real life and the fringing which initially defaced both images has been tamed.

Wulf

[kencaleno]

Here'a what I do:

- Lateral chromatic aberration (fringing) Removal

Ctrl+J select brush tool and click on the quick mask tool.
Choose a brush size to match the width of the fringe.
Draw all the areas that have fringing. When done, click icon next to quick mask
Select> Inverse.
Image> Adjustments> Hue/Saturation and pick the color closest to your fringe color Click eyedropper on the fringe color on your image.
drag Saturation slider to the left until the fringing goes.
Select> deselect
Save

Quick method for fringe elimination

Using lasso tool select area with fringing
Image> adjustments> Hue/Saturation
De saturate fringe color
Select> Deselect
save

[vsa]

Have you tried "Lens Correction" filter in Photoshop?
I find it lots easier than manually removing the fringes. Of course it's not perfect and in some cases won't work too well but I'd try that before manual labor.

And of course there's tools for this in Camera Raw and Lightroom too.

[wulf]

That would mean buying Photoshop! There are plugins for the Gimp which promise to do this automatically but, for me, it is a relatively uncommon occurrence and so the method above is quick enough.

Wulf

[vsa]

Originally Posted by wulf

That would mean buying Photoshop!

Well yea there's always that. >.<

There should be a postbit (that place where your avatar and other info are) field that tells peeps what software peeps use. .....or in signature.. oh well..