The bend in the rainbow in photography
The bend in the rainbow in photography | ||
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Not all colors of light bend at an angle when they pass through a lens. Different colors have different wavelengths, the distance between the high point of one wave in a beam of light to the high point in the next wave. That makes each color bend at a different angle. When light passes through raindrops, the drops act as lenses and break sky light into the colors of the spectrum. We call that a rainbow; when something similar happens in a camera, we call it chromatic aberration. In a photograph, it shows up as fringes or halos of color along the edges of objects in the picture. The aberration is prevented by an achromatic doublet, or achromat, a single lens made of two materials that are bonded together. Because each material has a different refractive index, their chromatic errors tend to cancel each other. The aberration is also corrected with image editing software. | ||