What it does
Splits the red, green, and blue channels slightly apart so edges fringe with color, like a photo taken through a misaligned lens.
The flaw is as old as the first telescope. A simple lens is a prism wrapped into a circle, and like a prism it refracts each wavelength by a slightly different amount, so the image forms in overlapping colored layers that never quite align. Newton judged the problem hopeless and switched to mirrors. Modern lenses tame it by pairing glass elements whose dispersions cancel, which is why the fringes survive mainly in cheap or vintage optics, and mainly at the edges: clean in the center, increasingly colored toward the corners, where light crosses the glass at its steepest angles.
The quick digital imitation copies the image three times, keeps one color channel from each copy, and slides them apart. It works, but it produces three hard ghost images, because a sensor’s red, green, and blue are only samples of a continuous spectrum. Real fringing grades smoothly through every color in between, orange into yellow into cyan, and the misfocused wavelengths arrive slightly soft, a halo rather than a crisp copy. An effect built by sweeping across the spectrum instead of shifting three plates keeps that continuous rainbow, and it holds together at strengths where the three-copy trick falls apart into separations.
There are two dialects. Lens-style fringing spreads outward from a focal point and strengthens with distance, so the middle of the image stays honest while the edges bloom; a small dose passes for a vintage prime or a worn security camera, and the eye reads authenticity rather than effect. The uniform split slides every pixel the same direction, which no lens does, and that is exactly its meaning: it is the look of the signal itself failing, the glitch grammar of music videos, stream overlays, and cyberpunk interfaces. Same physics, opposite messages.
Signature looks
Vintage prime
A whisper of red and cyan at the corners with a clean center. Reads as an old lens rather than an effect, right up until it is switched off.
Glitch split
A hard uniform split across the whole frame, the broadcast-error look. Text and edges double into red and blue ghosts.
Prism haze
Heavy spread softened into a rainbow halo, closer to light leaking through a prism than to a lens flaw. Dreamy rather than broken.
Try it on your own footage
This effect runs live in the Modulate editor, free with no signup — or start from the free tool page for a guided setup.
Common questions
What is chromatic aberration?
It is a lens defect in which different wavelengths of light focus at slightly different positions, so the color channels of a photo land slightly misaligned. It shows up as red, blue, or purple fringes along high-contrast edges, usually growing stronger toward the corners of the frame. As an effect, it is that flaw recreated deliberately, anywhere from a subtle vintage-lens fringe to an aggressive glitch.
Are RGB split and chromatic aberration the same effect?
They are cousins. Chromatic aberration is the optical phenomenon: radial fringing that grows toward the edges of the frame while the center stays clean, the way real lenses fail. RGB split is its digital descendant: the channels slide apart uniformly across the whole image, which no lens does. The split reads as a broken signal, the aberration reads as a real camera.
Why do photographers remove chromatic aberration but designers add it?
For a photographer the fringe is noise: it softens edges and betrays the lens, so raw processors correct it automatically. For a designer the same fringe is information: it says analog, vintage, or malfunctioning depending on the dose. Glitch aesthetics turned the flaw into a style in the early 2010s, and it has stayed in the toolkit since.
Why does a cheap RGB split show three ghost images?
Because it is built from three copies. Keeping one channel per copy and sliding them apart produces exactly three hard-edged plates. A real lens smears the image across the whole visible spectrum, grading smoothly through every intermediate color with a soft defocused halo. A spectral approach, sampling many wavelengths instead of three, keeps the fringe continuous even at extreme strengths.
Can you add chromatic aberration to video?
Yes, and it is most at home there, since the look grew up in moving images: worn tape, early camcorders, failing broadcasts. Applied live, the fringing tracks every frame, and animating its strength turns a static treatment into a pulse or an impact hit. In Modulate the effect runs on images and video in the browser and stacks with the rest of the glitch family.
Related effects
VHS effect
The full worn videotape package: color bleed, static, dropouts, wobble, and tracking errors.
Datamoshing
Smears moving parts of the image into blocky trails, like a corrupted video that never gets a clean frame.
Pixel sorting
Sorts runs of pixels into glitchy streaks by brightness, hue, or saturation. The classic pixel sorting look.
Wave effect
Bends the image with moving distortion: swirling turbulence, rolling directional waves, or rings spreading from a point.