Chromatic Aberration

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Have you noticed your digital pictures sometimes have an unwanted red or cyan outline?

DP review has a nice detailed description of the problem here: Chromatic Aberration by Vincent Bockaert. It has to do with the way digital sensors work and the angles of light involved.

Since I’m a semi-semi-professional digital retoucher, I can tell you how to fix it.

In Photoshop, you could select the area in question, go to Hue/Saturation, select “reds” and reduce the saturation. But in an image like this one* you can’t just select a big chunk because the flesh tones have red in them, you’d have to do a surgical select of just the problem section.

(CS3’s new selection tool rocks btw)

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Fortunately there’s a program that has a built-in feature for just this problem; it is called Picture Window Pro. It costs $90 and there’s a 30 day trial. I don’t use it for anything other than this one feature and it looks like it was written in 1987… 

Bonus link: Film is digital and digital is analog with unnecessary swearing including.

*Bet you can’t guess who’s eye that is 🙂

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