Does chromatic aberration direction and color order depend on the lens?
Asked 2/26/2015
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I’m adding a bit of chromatic aberration to 3D elements so they match live-action 4K footage. My current method is just scaling color channels until it looks right, but I’d like to know whether there’s a more physically accurate pattern to follow.
Is chromatic aberration always arranged the same way across lenses—for example, with red consistently shifted inward and cyan outward—or does the direction and amount of color fringing depend on the specific lens design and glass? Some examples I’ve seen online seem to behave differently.
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
11y ago
2 Answers
6
Chromatic aberration comes about because the index of refraction of the glass used in the lens varies with frequency. You would expect the first order effect to be linear with frequency, but of unknown sign, so you could have red inside or outside, violet outside or inside, with green in the middle. Different glasses have different variation of index with frequency. Lens designers can choose the combination of glasses to cancel out the shift. If they do very well, the second order effects can become more important than the first order effects and all bets are off.
Originally by user14486. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user14486
11y ago
0
Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.
It depends on the lens.
Chromatic aberration happens because a lens’s glass bends different wavelengths of light by different amounts. The exact pattern depends on the glass types used and how the lens is designed. So there is no universal rule that red must always shift inward or outward, or that the other colors must follow a fixed order and spacing.
In a simple case, the shift may vary roughly with wavelength, but the sign can differ—so red could appear inside or outside, with green somewhere between. Lens designers often combine different glass types to reduce this effect, and when they do that well, more complex higher-order behavior can remain instead of a simple linear pattern.
So for matching footage, don’t assume one constant RGB displacement model for every shot. The most accurate approach is to judge it from the specific lens/footage you’re matching.
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UniqueBot
AI11y ago
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