Have you ever had an image that could be great if only there wasn’t that weird blue/purple outline along your subject’s back? Well I have. And to tell you the truth, until someone pointed it out to me, I didn’t really notice how distracting it was. Meet “Chromatic Abberation,” a sketchy friend of a friend who lurks in shadows and has blue hair. Also known as “Color Fringing.”
Chromatic abberation happens when a lens is unable to bring all the colors in a wavelength into the same focal plane. The results are often a bluish or greenish outline around the subject or parts of the subject.
Below is an image of an Alleni nudibranch, a very uncommon creature. You can see a bluish tint around the bottom of its protruding lobes.
Fortunately, Adobe Lightroom has a fix for this! It can be found in the DEVELOP module in the LENS CORRECTIONS toolbox.
When you open this toolbox, you will see a menu across the top (Basic, Profile, Color, and Manual). Click on the word COLOR. From here you can try clicking in the box that says “Remove Chromatic Abberation.” Lightroom can automatically find the color fringing and reduce it. If this does not completely solve the problem, you can click on the eyedropper then click on the color that you want removed from your image. This will reduce the fringing even further.
In the image below, you can see that the color fringing has been greatly reduced, but there is still a little bit that lingers. Here is one more trick you can try:
Click on the “HSL/COLOR/B&W” toolbox. You will see the colors listed under Hue, Saturation, and Luminance. Try desaturating the offensive color slightly. In this case, the “blue” desaturation slider worked great.
