Fixing Chromatic Aberration Using ACR Adobe Camera Raw

How to Fix Chromatic Aberration in ACR (Adobe Camera Raw)

Hello everyone. In this tutorial, we're going to go over chromatic aberration and how to fix it in Photoshop. So before we dig in to how to fix chromatic aberration, let's talk real quick about what it is. Now I have a photo pulled up here in Adobe Camera Raw. Notice I'm zoomed in pretty close in the image. If we zoom back out, you can see that it's a backlit image. I have a window back here where the natural light is coming through. I don't have any light shining on the other end of the setup here. Okay, so notice when I zoom in pretty close, you can see that there's this ugly neon, kind of neon, purple line around her arms. That is chromatic aberration. It also occurs as green or blue hues as well, always a bright or neon shade.

So how does chromatic aberration occur? It's usually occurs with different variations. It can occur with harsh lighting, backlighting, which was the case here. Depending on the lens you're using as well, you may see chromatic aberration more than with other lenses. So you definitely want to zoom in really close if you have that type of image, with the harsh lighting or backlighting, and see if you have any of this present. It's always going to be outlining your subject or an object in the image. Again, just presenting itself as an outline. So let's go ahead and get rid of it.

Now, we can do this in Adobe Camera Raw. It is a free plugin with Photoshop. So to open it, you'll simply go to file, open in bridge, click on that. Navigate to your image that you want to edit in Adobe Camera Raw. You can click on it or right click on it and press open in raw or open in Adobe Camera Raw. So let's go ahead and take a look at this image here. Now, once you see Adobe Camera Raw appear on your screen, this is your film strip on the left hand side. I have the image selected that I want to correct here. And you'll usually see your basic panel up here by default, over here on the right hand side. Notice I have different icons that each represent a different panel that I'm clicking on here. This is our lens corrections panel. It is the sixth one in from the left. Now, usually you'll notice it's here on the profile tab. We're just going to click on color here in the middle. And this is how we control our chromatic aberration. You'll likely see that remove chromatic aberration is unchecked. Go ahead and click on that box.

Now our aberration appears in a purple hue so I'm going to take this purple slider and I'm going to drag it ever so slightly to the right. Notice how that purple line has completely disappeared. And you may want to zoom in a little bit further to see if you need to take that up just a bit. Now, if you notice it's not really doing anything to your image, it may simply be because you don't have that hue targeted. Maybe it's more of a blue and you can move these sliders down here over towards the blue hue and fix it that way. So notice when I do that, my purple reappears because I'm not targeting the purple hue. So I'm going to move these back over to the purple area of the slider down below. And this would of course work the same if you had a greenish, yellowish hue. You can bring your green slider up and then target the hue with the slider just below it. So whatever's between these two sliders is the color that you're targeting to remove.

So once you're done, you can go ahead and finish your edit in Adobe Camera Raw if you need to make any other additional changes. And select open image if you want to continue editing in Photoshop or just select done if you'd like to be done for now.

Okay, and real quick here, just in case you weren't able to follow along while I had pointed out how to open your image in Adobe Camera Raw, let me go ahead and go over that super fast here. Okay, so I'm going to go to file, up here at the top menu bar, and select browse in bridge. And we're going to wait for bridge to open up here. There we go. And then you can navigate to your image. Notice how I have my Dropbox available here. I can click on it. Over here in the left hand side, I have folders as well. You're going to navigate to your image, select the image that you want to open. If you want to select multiples, just shift click. Now you can right click and select open in Camera Raw, or you can just select this little shutter button here at the top and your images will automatically open up in Adobe Camera Raw just like so. Thanks guys.

All right, I hope you guys all enjoyed our super quick tip in this tutorial on how to identify and correct chromatic aberrations in Adobe Camera Raw.

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