Chromatic Aberration removal plugin or technique

[Anton Puttemans]

I bought a Sony CX760 for shooting surf, typically very contrasty scenes: white spray and boards, black wetsuits.
When I shoot from the beach with the zoom and also with the zoom conversion lens VCL-HG1737C I get nasty chromatic aberration all over the place. Very disappointed.
I still need to decide if I will keep the camera because I mainly want to shoot from in the water with the sportpack where it will all be wideangle, hopefully that will eliminate the problem.

Anyway I wanted to ask if there are any plugins or filter techniques to remove the CA in Adobe Premiere 6.
I find lots of tutorials for After Effects but of course would like to avoid trips to AE.

[Mike Beckett]

Anton,

I can't help, but I wish there was a fix. My NX70E (derived from your camera) suffers from the same problem when zoomed in, it is very frustrating.

[Anton Puttemans]

Yeah it's terrible. Looking more and more at my surf footage I start to see those damn green and purple fridging everywhere, even in my dreams, go figure.
Bah, I am seriously thinking about getting the VG20. The NXFS100 would be awsome but out of my budget.
Any tips on how to prevent/ reduce CA more than welcome...

[Jerry Karvasale]

I imagine surfing footage is the toughest to get without CA. A few basic tips to avoid it is to always stop down your aperture and to use the widest angle of your lens you can. I'm an AE guy so I think that's your best bet to try and remove it in post. The same tool many ppl use in AE is also in PPro, the change to color effect.

Removing Chromatic Aberration : Adobe After Effects Podcast

[Anton Puttemans]

Thanks for the AE tut Jerry.

I recently saw a tutorial on Magic Bullets website of a pro colorist using Colorista II for removing color casts with the HSL controls. Maybe I should check out the trial?
I think it would be easier to use such a plugin from PP with the new adjustment layer in CS6 because I have not much experience with AE.
How is the integration between PP and AE these days?

Yeah it looks like surf footage is prone to CA problems, but it might not be too difficult removing these casts from this kind of video. After all it's all waves, spray, boards and wetsuits. The purple color would not be too difficult to remove I guess but than again, I have no experience.
Green might be more difficult as our Italian waters are very greenish in sunny conditions.
What are you thoughts about this?

[Charles W. Hull]

I don't know if this technique will work with surf shots with video, but it gives amazing results with surf stills in Photoshop. Use the Shadow/Highlight tool, and select a small amount of Highlight (and select zero Shadow).

This removes some of the very bright reflections from the foam and lets the rest of the surf detail stand out and really pop. I've never had to correct for CA after using this effect. Again, I've only used it with stills and never had a chance to try it with video.

[Anton Puttemans]

Ok, I just found a much better technique than the "change to color effect"

With the three-way color corrector. You basically make a mask in secondary color correction, which you can really fine tune and than color correct for.

Color Correction 4: Secondary Colour Correction : Adobe Premiere Pro Tutorial

I still need to play around with it more, but so far this gives the best results.
I will also try with Magic Bullets Colorista later.

[Jerry Karvasale]

The integration between AE and PPro is great. Using Adobe Dynamic link you can switch between programs without having to render out. The workflow is decent in CS4. I'm upgrading to CS6 soon and heard it works even better.

Secondary color correction is an interesting idea to correct CA, great for shots with lots of color i imagine.

[Vincent Oliver]

You can open the offending footage in Photoshop (Extended version) and use the CA feature. I have done this several times with footage shot on my EX3

Here is a link to a thread with some examples I posted. - see post number 9

http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/sony-xdc...-question.html

[Anton Puttemans]

Thank you Oliver about the tip of correcting video in Photoshop!!

I tried it with my footage but unfortunately it looks like my CA is so severe I can't correct for it with the CA filters in Photoshop. I needed a much more fine tuned mask/ keyer.

Secondary color correction does the trick for me, after creating the mask and applying some blur I just lowered the saturation and came up with this. (Note that I did not correct yet for the greens)