Lateral (transverse) chromatic aberration is, in practice, a slight mismatch in image magnification between color channels. Different wavelengths form images of slightly different size, especially toward the edges of the frame, so high-contrast edges show red/cyan or blue/yellow fringes.

Because of that, software can often correct it without a lens profile by aligning the color channels directly from the image data. The basic fix is to use one channel, often green, as the reference and slightly scale or warp the red and blue channels so edge details line up again. In simple terms, it is correcting tiny color-dependent size differences across the frame.

A lens profile helps by supplying a known correction pattern for that lens, but it is not strictly required if the software can estimate the misregistration from the photo itself.

This works well for lateral CA because it behaves like channel misalignment. It does not fully solve longitudinal chromatic aberration, which changes with focus distance and appears in front of and behind the focus plane rather than as simple edge-to-edge scaling differences.