Digital Lighting & Rendering, Second Edition

180 Digital Lighting and Rendering

Chromatic Aberration

A lens artifact closely related to barrel distortion is called chromatic aber-

ration (CA). Chromatic aberration appears in an image as colored fringes

around bright lines or high-contrast edges, as shown in Figure 6.22.

CA occurs as light is focused through a lens, because different wavelengths

of light are refracted at different angles. For example, red light will refract

through the lens at a different angle than blue light, focusing at a different

point on the fi lm or sensor. This is the same principle that allows people

to split light into a rainbow using a prism. However, in a camera, ...