Benefits
of the plugin

Full control over the fringe color and fringe detection
Remove two fringe colors, or use double pass filtering
Full control over color correction, saturation and brightness
Not only removes the fringe color, but reconstructs the underlying color

The Color Fringe plugin works with these image modes (Windows and Mac)...
8 & 16 bit / channel: RGB, CMYK.

Color fringe
controls

This is the Color Fringe Remover plug-ins control panel. Click on the photo or the links to the right to see the controls at full size. The filter is actually two filters in one, so you can remove two fringe colors at once or do a double pass filtering.

1. Define fringe color
2. Adjust fringe detection
3. Remove fringe color
4. The plugin automatically reconstructs the original color suppressed by the fringe color

Example - removing green and purple fringes

The Color-fringe remover can remove two fringes at once. In this example we removed the classic green fringe and its companion the purple fringe

The left rectangle is the original.

What is a color fringe?

Theory

Actually there are several kinds of color fringes. One comes from chromatic aberration, which is the phenomena that the various colors of the spectrum refract differently through lenses and therefore get slightly misaligned in the final picture (in other words, the different colors don't focus on the same spot); this shows up as a green fringe and a purple fringe. Another common fringe comes when you have a strong back light and a high contrast edge in front of it, like when photographing trees against the sky. This fringe is typically blue, violet or purple. Sometimes a purple halo, or fringe, appears around small strong lights (like a candle or a small bulb) against a dark background. The plugin has presets for the most common fringes. Various lenses and situations produce different kinds of fringes and our Color Fringe Remover lets you fine tune the correction to any situation and save it for later use.

The color fringe controls

Color fringe controls

This is the control set for fringe color one. The controls for fringe two are identical.

The sliders above the "Show fringes" checkbox determine the color range of the fringe and also the filters sensitivity to what counts as a color fringe.

The sliders below determine how the plugin removes the fringe color and reconstructs the underlying color.

Finally there is a popup menu with presets for the most common fringes. There are five preset fringe colors.

Example - green and purple fringe

The following example is a typical instance of green and purple fringe. the green fringe is particularly saturated, so we had to change the default desaturation setting from 40 to 70 for the green fringe filter.

Double pass filtering

Double pass filtering of wide and massive color fringes

Sometimes a fringe may be so wide and massive, that the plugin does not readily catch all of it using just fringe one or fringe two. In that case you can do a double pass, without rerunning the plugin, by setting fringe one and fringe two to the same color. Such wide and massive fringes often appear when the fringe comes from hard back light situations as in the example below.

Since we wanted to preserve some green, we turned remove green down from 20 to 0 in both cases.

Problems reconstructing the underlying color

When the fringe color is very strong, it indicates that the underlying color is totally overshadowed and impossible to fully regenerate. This will typically leave a grayish fringe - - which in any case is more preferable than the original colored fringe.