Quick Tip: how to precisely detect and remove chromatic aberration in Lightroom

Chromatic aberration is a common (and annoying) lens problem. It causes the objects in your image to have colored lines, usually purple or green. Fortunately, you can easily remove it in Lightroom, but sometimes it can be difficult to detect the issue. Photographer Anthony Morganti shows you how to spot chromatic aberration in your photos using Alt/Option key, and how to remove it and get the best results.

In most cases, chromatic aberration creates green or purple lines, but sometimes they can take blueish tone as well (like in Anthony’s image). To remove it, you can use only a few clicks – go to Lens Corrections in Lightroom and select “Remove Chromatic Aberration.” It sometimes does the trick quite nicely, but other times, you need to make some extra adjustments to remove it completely.

To improve the results, go to the Manual panel, where you’ll have the sliders you can adjust. There are sliders for amount and hue of purple and green.

If you just move the sliders, you may not see too much of a change. However, if you hold Alt key on PC/Option key on Mac, and move the Amount slider, the screen will turn white. The areas where Lightroom sees fringe will be dark, so you’ll be able to clearly see the areas that the software recognizes as the fringe. This works for both the Green and the Purple Amount slider.

With the Purple Hue or Green Hue sliders, if you hold down Alt/Option key, the areas where Lightroom sees purple fringe will turn black. You can adjust the hue, and then go back to the amount slider, hold down Alt/Option again and fine tune it.

If you zoom out, you might notice that Lightroom also colors other areas of the photo black, which means it sees it as a fringe. According to Anthony, this isn’t something to worry about too much, because Defringe tool only applies to the high-contrast area so it will mainly affect the actual fringe. Still, try to find the balance.

Here are the results before and after on a detail from Anthony’s photo:

If you’d like to learn more about chromatic aberration, why it occurs and how to get rid of it, you can also check out this video from Anthony Morganti: