I’ve been taking a few shots of birds over the last couple of weeks. More specifically, small birds trying to find food in the snow. As a result, the images are all very high contrast with the areas of detail very small (such as twigs, leaves, very small birds, etc.) Unfortunately, these are perfect conditions for chromatic aberration problems to occur – and they have. I’m sure if I were using the ultimate in lens quality – the Canon “L” series, I would not have the same problems but unfortunately, I’m not. However, I today discovered this neat little app which has a database of thousands of lenses and can correct a number of common distortion and aberration problems for you. The trial lets you correct up to 10 images, but a full licence is only US$25 anyway.
PTLens (http://epaperpress.com/ptlens/)
Not only does this software correct chromatic aberration, it also does many other lens corrections such as pincushion/barrel distortion, vignetting and perspective.
The image below on the left has quite severe purple fringing, but after a software tweak, it’s all gone!
Users of Adobe Lightroom also have the ability to easily fix this problem by using the Lens Correction settings. They are located towards the bottom of the tool pane, when in Develop mode.