ENDA Episode 254 → The time when ENDA tells a little secret called: Chromatic Aberration (Part 1)

One of the first things we learn about live-action plates is that they are not pixel-perfect images.

After all, lenses have optical limitations that cause certain artefacts or distortions, making the image “imperfect”.

But those small details are exactly what help make it believable.

One of those details is chromatic aberration.

Chromatic aberration is an optical distortion caused by the dispersion of light, where not all colour wavelengths hit the same point in the image. This creates a colour fringe along the edges of an object.

In other words, it is that rainbow edge you sometimes see in printed photographs when you take a closer look.

CG renders do not usually come with this included, and neither does most stock footage you might find online.

And even if they did have it, I am sorry to tell you that there are different types of chromatic aberration, and they will not necessarily match your plate.

So yes, we need to know how to create our own chromatic aberration.

And, for starters, we need to know the usual way.

In the video below, you can see that the setup is pretty simple: three Shuffle nodes, each one holding one of the RGB channels.

Then we ShuffleCopy them again to reconstruct the original image. In the middle of that setup, we add Transform nodes to control the movement and position of each channel.

We gave each one a small animation as a test to see what kind of effects we could achieve, but the usual chromatic aberration would be subtle and almost unnoticeable.

It seems like a good setup, one where we have full control over each of our channels.

But what if I told you that there are nodes that could help us achieve the same effect, and even add more parameters?

Interested?

Well, that will be for a future episode.

The journey continues…