If you’re using a less expensive lens or are shooting in some weird lighting, you may have noticed some glowing edges in your photos. These glowing edges are called color fringe, or chromatic aberration. I’m pretty sure that every single serious photographer under the sun has experienced this type of thing in their photography, so don’t sweat it. Also, in most pictures, it’s not a big deal and it’s not even noticeable. In others though, under the right lighting conditions, it can be a big deal and this fringe can skew the colors of your photos. In cases like these, you want to use Adobe Camera Raw to correct the problem.
To remove the fringe from your photos, you’ll need to first open the photo into Camera Raw. Then, open the Lens Corrections tab. Inside that tab are a few sliders. Two of the sliders handle the red fringe and the other two sliders handle the blue fringe.
The way I like to do it is like so: I’ll first zoom in a whole lot to see the fringe up close. Then, I’ll push the Purple Amount slider about half way over to the right. Then, I’ll click in between the two handles of the Purple Hue slider and drag that color range to the right or to the left, depending on what the color the actual fringe is. Since the Amount slider is already centered, I easily see the correction effect immediately as I drag. Then, I do the same thing for the Green sliders.
By correcting and removing the chromatic aberration from your images, you’ll be sharpening them, clarifying them and color correcting them, all in one shot. Please let me know if you have any questions or anything to add. Thanks!
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