A real spectral sweep, not three shifted copies: lens fringing that grows toward the corners, or a hard RGB split, live on your footage.
How to use it
- Open the editor from this page — it loads demo media with the effect already set up — then drop in your own video or image.
- Pick a mode: Radial for lens fringing that grows toward the corners, Directional for a uniform RGB split. Then set the intensity and halo.
- Press play to preview it in motion, then export an MP4 or PNG.
A spectral sweep, not three shifted copies
The tool runs the two dialects of the effect. Radial is the lens: fringing spreads outward from the center and strengthens toward the corners, with a falloff control that sets the ramp, from a gentle linear rise to a ring that only bites at the very edge. Directional drops the physics and slides the whole frame along one angle, the uniform RGB split of glitch edits and music videos. In both modes the split is built by sweeping many samples across the visible spectrum rather than shifting three copies apart, so the fringe grades smoothly through orange, yellow, and cyan at any strength instead of separating into hard red, green, and blue plates.
Two knobs set the fringe character. Halo spreads the spectral samples sideways, the way misfocused wavelengths land as a soft disc rather than a point: at zero the split stays crisp, raised it becomes the glow of light through a prism. Smoothness sets how many samples build the sweep, and high values hold a continuous rainbow even at maximum intensity. The same Chromatic Aberration effect ships in the Modulate editor, where the focal point can be moved off-center, intensity can be keyframed for pulses and impact hits, and it stacks with VHS, datamosh, and the rest of the glitch family.
Common questions
Is this chromatic aberration tool free?
Yes. This page opens the full Modulate editor, free with no signup, with the effect already set up. Anonymous exports run up to 5 seconds at 1080px with a small watermark; a free account removes the watermark and raises exports to 1920px and 30 seconds, and Pro raises the caps to 4K and 5 minutes.
Does it work on video or just images?
Both. Drop in an MP4, WebM, or MOV and the fringing is computed on every frame as it plays; drop in a photo for a still with true spectral fringing rather than a pasted channel offset.
How do I get the RGB split look?
Switch the mode to Directional. The channels then slide apart uniformly along the angle dial, the classic glitch split. Keep the halo at zero for hard-edged ghosts, or raise it to melt the split into a prism blur.
What does the halo control do?
It widens the fringe perpendicular to the split, mimicking how misfocused wavelengths land as a soft disc instead of a point. At zero you get a pure one-directional shift; at full, the spread becomes a round, dreamy bloom around every edge.
Are my files uploaded to a server?
No. The effect runs entirely in your browser on your GPU. Your media never leaves your computer unless you save it to a Modulate project yourself.
Go deeper
Chromatic aberration
Chromatic aberration is the lens flaw where colors focus at slightly different positions, leaving red and blue fringes along high-contrast edges. Glass bends short blue wavelengths more than long red ones, so the color channels of the image land slightly apart, worst toward the corners of the frame. Lens designers spend enormous effort correcting it; digital artists add it back on purpose, because a trace of fringing reads as a real camera and a heavy split reads as a signal breaking apart.
VHS effect
The VHS effect makes digital video look like it was recorded and played back on tape: soft resolution, a wobbling image, tracking bands that tear across the frame, color that lags and bleeds behind the brightness, dropouts, and noise. Every one of those artifacts has a physical cause in the tape or the player, which is why a convincing VHS effect is a simulation of the machine, not a scanline overlay.
Datamoshing
Datamoshing is a glitch technique that breaks the motion side of video compression: the decoder keeps applying fresh motion to stale pixels because the clean keyframes that would correct them are gone. Moving subjects smear into blocky trails, stopped motion keeps flowing, and the image only recovers when a new keyframe finally lands. It is the most cinematic glitch there is, because it is made of the video’s own movement.
Pixel sorting
Pixel sorting rearranges the actual pixels of an image along straight lines: contiguous runs of pixels that pass a brightness test are reordered by brightness, hue, or saturation, so each run becomes a smooth ramp and the image appears to bleed into streaks of light. Nothing is added and nothing is lost, every pixel survives in a new position, which is why sorted images keep an unmistakably photographic grain inside the abstraction.
There's more where this came from
The full editor lets you use every effect together, over video, text, 3D, and shapes. Free, no signup, nothing to install — it opens with this effect already set up.
Open the editor