Purple Fringe

A quick shout-out about my discovery of purple fringe and what to do about controlling it, which is not to be confused with the song Purple Rain. Although humming Purple Rain while working on this digital manifestation I find does seem to help reduce stress. As a black and white film photographer who has incorporated digital color into his technical process portfolio, I had read about chromatic distortions which occurs both as purple and green fringing. Maybe its been present in some of my digital images all along and I just did not really notice. That is until recently.

Just as the COVID pandemic was breaking loose, I had started working another body of work as result of my experimental/play process. One aspect of the new images were a lot of highlights that included some pretty significant purple and green fringing. At the time, I accepted these as something that came with the experimenting I was doing and I had no idea of how to reduce or eliminate its occurrence, such as the image above. Actually thought that these purple and green visual effects were pretty cool.

I just updated to the 2020 Bridge/RAW and 2020 Photoshop, and when I was in Raw making some adjustment to an image in the Optics sub-folder, I noted another setting for Defringing. Some bells went off and so I opened this folder menu and saw some interesting sliders for both purple and green fringing. Who knows, maybe these were in the earlier version of Bridge/Raw conversion, but I sure had not noticed. But then again, I did not have images with huge amounts of purple and green fringing as I have in the last couple of months.

So after poking around and working these sliders I noticed some interesting visual changes on the image I had open, which also had some significant purple and green fringing. I could in fact reduce & eliminate both the purple and green fringing. hmmmm.  I also noticed that adjusting these Optic sliders does make some global color changes, but very subtly. So appears that there is probably not a set ‘formula’ for making changes to the fringing, but each image needs to carefully be adjusted as to its pros and cons for the changes. At the top is the image with purple and green fringing, while below is the image after I had eliminated/reduced the amount of color fringing making the adjustments with the defringing sliders in the RAW Optics menu.

Going back and taking a quick look at this body of work, I can see a consistent pattern of the purple and greens that does not necessarily seem to help every image in this series. Maybe including this effect in a few image creates some visual variety, but perhaps not every image needs to include this color fringing effect. It does appear I need to go back and re-evaluate all of the images that I had worked on over the last couple of months.

But hey, with COVID-19 and sheltering-in-place, what else do I have to do? And better to figure this out now than later. So I hope that this information might help you as well, and  if this is old news, just don’t let me know that you are laughing at me. I would rather think it’s about an old dog learning new tricks.

Cheers & stay safe,

Douglas Stockdale

_____

My other exhibitions and workshops:

Los Angles Center of Photography’s (LACP) Artsy.net exhibition this month, which runs through June 30th, group exhibition.

Fabrik Projects, Here Comes the Sun, 3D virtual exhibition, featuring artwork from my Memory Pod series. Exhibition dates: June 6th – July 4th, 2020

The Photographers Eye’s gallery exhibition, Living and Photographing in the Time of COVID-19, group virtual exhibition that includes two of my diptychs from the series A Developing Crisis. This online exhibition is from May 8th through August 1st, 2020.

Medium Photo 2020 Workshop: Developing a Creative Book workshop that I will be leading, is now rescheduled for September 24 – 27th, 2020, a four-day extended weekend workshop in San Diego.

____

Featured artwork; Fresnel Coefficients 4153 (Quantum Elements) copyright 2020, Douglas Stockdale