Possible downsides to leaving "Remove Chromatic Aberration" on all the time?

[earlybird]

I was working on some photos of Trumpet Swans at sunrise last night and found ACR's "Remove Chromatic Aberration" useful.

It left me wondering why I have not had that option activated as part of my ACR default. Maybe I should?

What possible downsides may there be?

[bjanes]

I was working on some photos of Trumpet Swans at sunrise last night and found ACR's "Remove Chromatic Aberration" useful.

It left me wondering why I have not had that option activated as part of my ACR default. Maybe I should?

What possible downsides may there be?

That is a good question and one could extend the question to whether one should enable profile corrections at all. When one is moving pixels around in the image, some loss of quality is always present to some degree. The choice would depend on the type of image and the degree of correction of the lens. If one is doing architectural photography with a zoom wide angle lens that has significant distortion, distortion correction would be highly beneficial and one would enable lens corrections.  The various upright adjustments would also be helpful here.

If one us using a highly corrected apochromatic lens such as one of the Zeiss Otuses, correction of chromatic aberration is probably not necessary. Perhaps the profile for such lenses would realize that chromatic aberration correction might be unnecessary with an apochromatic lens and not apply any.

With portraiture, distortion may not be problematic if one is using a decent lens, and some degree of vignetting may actually be desirable.

The lens corrections are computationally intensive and may slow down editing adjustments. To avoid this, one could turn corrections off while editing, and then turn then back on when editing is completed.

Regards,

Bill

[earlybird]

I think I was imagining possible issues with color rendition in instances when adjacent color combinations that may appear as an aberration issue aren't actually the result of aberration.
I rarely find aberration issues when I am working. The case I mentioned above, with a white bird against a dark background lit by a bright sunrise seemed to be an occasion that would reveal an issue with many lenses.

The remove function worked so well it made me wonder if I should just leave it on all the time. 

[Richowens]

 I am going to say no. If t isn't necessary on every, or the majority, of my images, I see no need to have it on consuming

memory and cpu cycles.

 This is my personal opinion.

Rich

[earlybird]

Thanks for sharing your opinion.

I am primarily interested in learning if there are any downsides that negatively effect the picture quality of images that do not present aberration issues.

The reason I am considering leaving it on is that I have begun working with 51Mp files and in the instance of the birds mentioned above I did not notice the aberration until I was zoomed in at 100%. It made me realize that if there are some issues, such as on a small highlight in some routine image file, that inspecting for such issues will take a lot of pixel peaking time and just leaving the filter on may be a better approach.

[Stanmore]

I leave it on as my default. I see (or intellectualise) no downside. Apparently, neither does anybody that commissions me.
Whether it's on or off as your default, it will make no difference to your images ... Because you will turn it on when you see it's needed, so - errm - do the math.

[earlybird]

It took me a while to figure it out but I finally realized that the lens correction function is also available in Photoshop as a plug in filter. I had thought that I had to go back to ACR and repeat the RAW conversion to access the filter, but now I see that I can instantiate the process whenever I want so I have elected to leave the Remove Aberration option off in my default ACR processing.

Having said that I worked with a photo today where I noticed some aberration as purple fringing at the extreme lower right corner of a shot that had a lot of back and rim lighting from the upper left falling on the edge of some large sized river rocks.

When I used the Remove Aberration filter I saw a slight loss of contrast and detail occur throughout the photo. (I was zoomed in quite a bit to observe the fringing when I noticed the difference.) I was a bit surprised at the difference in apparent texture details. I ended up discarding the results of the process and just used hand editing techniques to remove the fringing while retaining the original sense of detail.

Thanks for all the advice.

I am going to stick with evaluating and responding on a case by case basis.