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Chromatic aberration is the colour fringing you see at the edges of photos taken with cheaper or vintage lenses: because a lens bends different wavelengths of light by slightly different amounts, the red, green and blue versions of the image don't line up perfectly, leaving thin cyan/red or blue/orange halos along high-contrast edges. This tool recreates that effect digitally. It keeps the green channel as the reference and resamples the red channel from a position scaled slightly outward from the centre and the blue channel from a position scaled slightly inward, using bilinear interpolation for a smooth result. Because real lens fringing is zero at the optical centre and strongest in the corners, the split here grows with distance from the middle of the frame. You control the Amount (overall strength) and the Falloff — Balanced grows the fringe steadily from centre to edge, while Edges only keeps the centre clean and concentrates the colour split in the corners. The green channel and the alpha channel are left untouched; only red and blue move, and the image borders are clamped so the warp never leaves a seam. Everything runs locally on the HTML canvas — your image is never uploaded, the effect is fully deterministic, and there is no sign-up and no watermark.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is chromatic aberration?
Chromatic aberration is an optical effect where a lens focuses different colours of light at slightly different magnifications, so the red, green and blue layers of a photo drift apart and leave coloured fringes — usually cyan/red or blue/orange — along high-contrast edges. It is a hallmark of cheap, wide, or vintage lenses, and is often added on purpose for a retro, lo-fi, glitch or VHS aesthetic. This tool reproduces it by shifting the red and blue channels radially while leaving green in place.
What do the Amount and Falloff controls do?
Amount is the overall strength of the colour separation: at 0 the image is left exactly as it was, and higher values push the red and blue channels further apart. The fringing always grows from nothing at the centre of the frame to its maximum in the corners, mimicking a real lens. Falloff controls the shape of that growth — Balanced spreads the fringe smoothly across the whole frame, while Edges only keeps the middle of the image clean and concentrates the colour split in the extreme corners.
Does it change my image's colours everywhere?
Not everywhere, and not the way a colour filter would. The green channel is never moved, and the centre of the image stays essentially untouched; the effect only nudges the red and blue channels outward and inward, blending neighbouring pixels as it resamples them. The visible colour fringes appear along high-contrast edges, growing toward the corners — flat, evenly coloured areas show little or no change.
Is my image uploaded anywhere?
No. The entire effect runs in your browser on the HTML canvas — your photo never leaves your device, nothing is sent to a server, and there is no sign-up and no watermark. The effect is fully deterministic, so the same image and settings always produce an identical result; the image edges are clamped rather than wrapped, so there are no seams, and the result can be downloaded as a PNG.