iStockphoto - Stock Photography Training Manual

4.0 Quality Standards

4.9 Chromatic Aberration

Chromatic aberrations, or purple (or blue/cyan/red/yellow) fringing occurs when not all the wavelengths of light hitting your lens are focused properly on the sensor. This usually causes a coloured fringe or halo around the edges of your subject outlines. It is annoying, looks bad, and will show up in print production, so you need to get rid of it, especially if the appearance is severe and visible on important parts of the image.

Unacceptable:

Tips:

  • Close down your lens if possible.
  • Watch the angle of your light source and where you point your lens.
  • Quality lenses will be much less prone to this problem. Old lenses without proper coating, or very cheap lenses, will fringe easily. They also are generally less sharp and will produce poor quality detail.
  • There are a variety of plug-ins and applications out there to help reduce and remove chromatic aberrations. You can manually remove fringing in your preferred image editing program.

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Contents

1.0 iStockphoto's Standards

2.0 Account Information

3.0 Image Requirements

4.0 Quality Standards

5.0 Film Scans

6.0 Title, Description & Keywords

7.0 Legal Requirements

8.0 Model & Property Releases

9.0 Editorial Use Only Images

10.0 Prohibited Uses

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