Alister Chapman, Cinematographer, DIT, and Educator – Personal Website

What causes CA or Purple and Blue fringes in my videos?

Blue and purple fringes around edges in photos and videos are nothing new. Its a problem we have always had. telescopes and binoculars can also suffer. It’s normally called chromatic aberration or CA. When we were all shooting in standard definition it wasn’t something that created too many issues, but with HD cameras and 4K cameras it’s a much bigger issue because as you increase the resolution of the system (camera + lens) generally speaking, CA becomes much worse.

As light passes through a glass lens the different wavelengths that result in the different colours we see are diffracted and bet by different amounts. So the point behind the lens where the light comes into sharp focus will be different for red light to blue light.

A simple glass lens will bend red, green and blue wavelengths by different amounts, so the focus point will be slightly different for each.
A simple glass lens will bend red, green and blue wavelengths by different amounts, so the focus point will be slightly different for each.

The larger the pixels on your sensor the less of an issue this will be. Lets say for example that on an SD sensor with big pixels, when the blue light is brought to best focus the red light is out of focus by 1/2 a pixel width. All you will see is the very slightest red tint to edges as a small bit of out of focus red spills on to the adjacent pixel. Now consider what happens if you increase the resolution of the sensor. If you go from SD to HD the pixels need to made much smaller to fit them all on to the same size sensor. HD pixels are around half the size of SD pixels (for the same size sensor). So now that out of focus red light that was only half the width of an SD pixel will completely fill the adjacent pixels so the CA becomes more noticeable.

In addition as you increase the resolution of the lens you need to make the focus of the light “tighter” and less blurred to increase the lenses resolving power. This has the effect of making the difference between the focus points of the red and blue light more distinct, there is less blurring of each colour, so less bleed of one colour into the other and as a result more CA as the focus point for each wavelength becomes more distinct. When each focus point is more distinct the difference between the in focus and out of focus light becomes more obvious, so the colour fringing becomes more obvious.

This is why SD lenses very often show less CA than HD lenses, a softer more blurry SD lens will have less distinct CA. Lens manufacturers will use exotic types of glass to try to combat CA. Some types of glass have a negative index so blue may focus closer than red and then other types of glass may have a positive index so red may focus closer than blue. By mixing positive and negative glass elements within the lens you can cancel out some of the colour shift. But this is very difficult to get right across all focal lengths in zoom lenses so some CA almost always remains. The exotic glass used in some of the lens elements can be incredibly expensive to produce and is one of the reasons why good lenses don’t come cheap.

Rather than trying to eliminate every last bit of CA optically the other approach is to electronically reduce the CA by either shifting the R G B channels in the camera electronically or reducing the saturation around high contrast edges. This is what ALAC or CAC does. It’s easier to get a better result from these systems when the lens is precisely matched to the camera and I think this is why the CA correction on the Sony kit lenses tends to be more effective than that of the 3rd party lenses.

Sony recently released firmware updates for the PMW200 and PMW300 cameras that improves the performance of the electronic CA reduction of these cameras when using the supplied kit lenses.
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