How do YOU do chromatic aberration?

malcolm

I wanted to start a thread for this, just curious how other people are doing this I mostly work in stills but post your techniques 2d, 3d, after effects, photoshop, 3ds max, maya what ever.

For me:
In photoshop filter> distor> lens correction> fix red/cyan fringe -15 or more depending on the look you want.

Moosey_G

Maybe this is a stupid question to ask, but why would you want to create chromatic aberration on your photo?

Swizzle

jocose

hmm, doesn't seam like the type of effect most people would be either familiar with or desire to create.

I'm with Moosey_G, why do you want to do this?

ZacD

I want my renders to look so photo real that they look like bad photos.

Revel

Well if I remember correctly, people will add this effect on a real photo/ scene rendered 3D image, so that it'll add another level of realism in to the picture (what I called a "Lens Error" effect..lol, don't know the correct term). But I personally use this effect only 1 or 2 times using Photoshop. But if you want to add it in 3ds Max viewport directly, you can try Xoliul's PostShader.

_Revel

Blaizer

Another option is to use motiva realcamera, it has various features for postprocess, http://www.motivacg.com/descargas_en.php

and a video: http://vimeo.com/7720630

r_fletch_r

i usually just offset a channel in photoshop. It needs to be very very subtle though otherwise it starts to look like a 3d pic from the 90s(remember those glasses).

Jocoose: Its a camera error people are unconsciously used to seeing. much like vignette and grain. it helps to remove the cg feel and make something appear more film like. Like anything tho hamfisted application looks crap.

MoP

When I've been doing it I was just manually offsetting/scaling channels in PS. I did the same in After Effects for animated stuff too.

Using a filter would seem to be easier, although there doesn't seem to be anything by default in AE (unless I'm missing it), I think you can buy plugins which include the functionality though.

And r_fletch_r's description is spot on - any effect like this, if applied inappropriately or heavy-handedly, will look rubbish instead of subtly cool. I'm pretty sure I've been guilty of that in the past

EarthQuake

The lens correct method is the easiest, and as others have mentioned, it looks best when you dont really notice it is there.... CA is becoming the new lens flare for renders in a lot of ways.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/499159/m7render02.jpg

Also, channel offseting isn't really the "correct" way to do it, if we're talking about how cameras actually work etc.

cryrid

Saw this for UDK. http://www.game-artist.net/forums/support-tech-discussion/13682-tutorial-chromatic-aberration-udk.html

Lamont

EarthQuake wrote: »

The lens correct method is the easiest, and as others have mentioned, it looks best when you dont really notice it is there.... CA is becoming the new lens flare for renders in a lot of ways.

Made me laugh!!

I use a mask to adjust how much each area moves, more on the edges, less in the center. I do this channel by channel. But I've only done this one one product shot, and it was only because there was a ton of glass. Other than that...

malcolm

Moosey_G, Swizzle, jocose, ZacD have you seen this guy's renders?

http://vimeo.com/7809605

It's not his 3d models and textures that make them look great, it's all the post process work he's doing which really make's it look photo real. Vignette, bloom, depth of field, chromatic abberation, colour correction, noise, I like to use all of these in my renders for realism or stylized renders. I also like lens flares, I feel the whole lens flares are cheesy comment is due to bad art not a bad effect. Like any effect you can do a bad job of tuning it and then it will look cheesy. Ever seen the movie star trek 2009 I think there's a lens flare in every single shot, it's like they intentionally pointed the camera into a light whenever they could I thought that movie looked extremely good and well art directed.

http://andrewsidea.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/startrek1.jpg

okno

EarthQuake wrote: »

Also, channel offseting isn't really the "correct" way to do it, if we're talking about how cameras actually work etc.

You can get a comic book style printing misalignment effect when you offset CMYK though

rollin

cheers Blaizer for the link!!

ZacD

malcolm wrote: »

Moosey_G, Swizzle, jocose, ZacD have you seen this guy's renders?

http://vimeo.com/7809605

yeah the break downs are the most impressive part of those videos, the renders were pretty meh okay before all the effects got added in.

But right now Chromatic abberation seems to be like a "lense flare" effect, because people are only using it and are abusing it.

MoP

I used chromatic aberration on this render using the "Lens Correction" trick posted above (cheers, never knew about that!)
Is it too heavy-handed?
http://www.greveson.co.uk/dump/ibanez_wip_12.jpg

JordanW

mop i dont think it's heavy handed at all. I feel like a lot of the people who compare it to lens flares and make fun of it aren't really contributing to the discussion (unless they are then they just say it for fun But I think it's a valid technique, especially when I see it in almost any photo i've ever taken with my camera. Yeah it can be overdone but so can DOF effects, ambient occlusion, lens flares, god rays, etc.... welcome to being an artist and learning constraint


Oh and my method is to just use the photoshop filter. Often times I'll do it a couple times, I'll do it slightly to the highlights, a little heavier to the DOF/bokeh, then slightly heavier to the edges of the screen, these are the usual areas CA appears in an image.

r_fletch_r

Mop: that looks awesome, is that a vray render? it has a vray feel to it.

Im really stoked to see these effects being used in games, Camera work in games is in general getting so much better. Seeing people make the effort to emulate physical cameras is awesome. ME2 had some nice 'Handheld' shots as far as i recall. (speaking of ME I cant wait to see how they put some of the new ue3 color grading effects)

malcolm

Mop that looks great, looks like a photo. What are you reflecting on that guitar, is it the actual scene or is it a skybox of some sort. I remember in tomb raider underworld I quite liked their handy cam mode it had a very heavy abberation, looked great.

MoP

malcolm, very little is going on in that scene - I don't even have an environment. the "sky" is just a flat mid desaturated blue colour as the Environment Background colour of the camera in Maya.
The ground plane has a mid-grey slightly reflective material, the plane has been extruded up at two of the sides so it's like half a shoebox.

Then I've just got a single area light on the left (which is what's causing the bright highlight from the left), and a fully-white emissive set of 4 quads arranged to look like a fake window to the right (causing the window reflection you can see clearly on the volume control knob).

I'm beginning to see that having a proper environment (or at least a good cubemap/sphere map, especially if you have an HDRI one) is a big factor in getting a photorealistic render. I'll probably construct a little room with some objects in it and some light sources for my final render, just so the reflections and lighting look believable.

rollin

nice one mop! It's quite subtle and building a complete fake-room will give you the kind of complex reflections that makes it look real

r_fletch_r

have you tried a light probe, you should get better results than with a 3d room.

these are free and very good quality
http://www.crazy8studio.com/hdr.php

MoP

r_fletch_r: Cheers for the link, I was looking for some stuff like that recently and I knew there had been a good link posted recently on the forums - that was it!

malcolm

Cool Mop, I like the studio render feel it has. I find the hdr probes a lot of the time are too complex and noisy for the look I like. Way back in the day when I was working on my portfolio I used a probe from Paul Debevec.

http://www.debevec.org/probes/

The Funston Beach at Sunset I found works quite well because it's not too noisy. By the way are you doing your depth of field in post in photoshop or is that out of the 3d package?

r_fletch_r

why don't you blur them out a bit? You have to do this anyway to create a good light probe

malcolm

Think I tried that quite a while ago back in hdr shop, maybe I ran into the edge seam problem. Can't remember if hdr shop could blur cube maps.

DrunkShaman

Swizzle wrote: »

Are we still not over that lens flare joke?