Why is there a cyan outline around the out-of-focus building against an overexposed sky?
Asked 4/25/2012
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I shot a JPEG on a Fujifilm X-Pro1 with the background building out of focus and the sky overexposed. Around the edge of the building there’s a cyan/blue outline visible at pixel level. Is this caused by chromatic aberration, Fuji sensor/RAW processing, or simply the blurred edge of a dark building against a very bright sky?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
14y ago
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The sky on a sunny day is cyan (primarily green and blue with some red). Where the intake of light is really bright, all three color components (red, green, blue) on the sensor chip are fully saturated (at their maximum counter values), which results in overexposure, or pure white in this case.
What you're seeing as a cyan outline is actually the result of that section of the image not being pegged to pure white, because the darkness of the gray building is interfering with (blurring) the ligthness of the sky, and thus preventing the sensor counters from attaining their maximum (e.g, overexposed) values in that region.
If you were to shoot the image again with the same exposure values, but this time with the building in sharp focus instead of the subject, then you would see a sharp line where the building is solid gray-ish and the sky is overexposed to pure white, but no more cyan fringing.
This effect is very similar to the laser bolts in the some of the space battles in Star Wars — where light green or light red charged-particle beams are a white line in the center, surrounded by a beautiful pure color fading out to black. The pure white in the center is simply an artifact of over-exposure; there is no actual white light there.
Note that if you had a light source that was pure red, pure blue, or pure green (such that it perfectly matched the receptor frequencies of your sensor), then you would not see over-exposure toward white, but instead over-exposure to a single color component only.
Originally by user8001. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user8001
14y ago
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It’s most likely the blurred transition between the dark building and the very bright sky, not a special Fuji sensor artifact.
On a sunny day the sky is naturally cyan/blue. In the brightest parts of your image, the sky is overexposed enough that all RGB channels clip to white. But along the out-of-focus edge of the building, the dark building tone mixes with the bright sky blur, so that area doesn’t fully clip to white. Instead, some of the sky’s underlying cyan color remains visible, creating the blue/cyan rim.
If the building were in focus, you’d expect a much cleaner edge rather than this soft colored fringe.
Chromatic aberration is less likely here. CA more often shows up as colored fringing from lens behavior, commonly magenta/purple or green on high-contrast edges. What you’re seeing fits ordinary defocus blur plus highlight clipping much better.
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