Wednesday, March 14, 2012

What is Chromatic Aberration?

Question

What is Chromatic Aberration? Is it a physical part of the lens, or just an optical illusion?

Asked by WireGuy

Answer

Chromatic Aberration is a distortion that occurs when a lens focuses different colours slightly differently.

It is caused by the refractive index of the lens (the amount that the lens bends light) being slightly different for different colours, so I suppose you could say it is caused by physical properties of the lens. It is possible to produce higher quality lenses that exhibit this effect to a lesser extent.

Wikipedia has a very detailed article on chromatic aberration.

Answered by Simon P Stevens

No comments:

Post a Comment