Chromatic Aberration In Your Stock Photos

(A.K.A "purple fringe", A.K.A annoying)

Chromatic aberration is a type of color distortion that manifests itself as "fringes" of color along edges that separate dark and bright parts of an image.

Both Lightroom, and Bridge have tools that are specifically for removing chromatic aberration, problem is... they just don't remove enough. Time for the big guns. In this tutorial we will use Photoshop.

Cute kid, but let's take a closer look.

This is Chromatic Aberration

See it, that nasty reddish edge around the fingers. It can be red, purple, green, blue. It just depends on the contrasting colors. Evil stuff, let's kill it!

Now that you've spotted your problem areas, drag the background layer (or effected layer) down to the new layer icon, or Cmd + J, (PC) Ctr + J. This will give us a copy of our current layer.

Next let's open the Noise Filter Dialog Box. Go to Filter > Noise > Reduce Noise.

The Reduce Noise dialog box utilizes a large preview area on the left so you can see the changes you're making in real time. Check and uncheck the preview box to see the filter applied and removed. You've got some sliders and radio buttons on your right. Lower all the sliders to zero. Next slide the Reduce Color Noise to the right until the chromatic aberration is gone. Click "OK"

Now that you've applied your filter let's paint it on the effected areas leaving the rest of the photo unaffected by the filter. Add a layer mask. You can hold Option (Alt) as you click the Add Layer Mask icon to fill it black, rendering the layer invisible, or after you've applied the layer mask you can fill it black.

With the mask still selected grab a soft brush and paint the noisy area's with white so the filter shows through reducing the chromatic aberration only where you paint.

You should end up with an almost chromatic aberration free image.