Image Chromatic Aberration

Chromatic aberration is a lens flaw - cheap or extreme optics fail to focus every wavelength of light at exactly the same point, so you get that telltale color fringing at high-contrast edges: red and cyan (or magenta and green) splitting apart toward the corners of the frame. It shows up in real vintage lenses, cheap disposable cameras, CRT monitors, and - deliberately, as an aesthetic choice - in a lot of sci-fi and cyberpunk cinematography. Image Chromatic Aberration replicates that effect on a flat image.

Why you'd use it

AI-generated images can look too clean - every edge crisp, no optical imperfection anywhere, which paradoxically reads as artificial. A touch of chromatic aberration is one of the cheapest ways to break that up and nudge an image toward "shot on a real camera" or "80s VHS sci-fi" territory, depending on how far you push it. It's a stylistic finishing touch, not a fix for anything - apply it after your generation and any upscale, as one of the last steps before you save.

How it works

Mechanically it's channel offset: the red, green, and blue channels of the image get shifted slightly relative to each other, typically radiating outward more strongly toward the edges of the frame the way a real lens does. Push it subtle and it reads as a faint, almost-unnoticeable realism cue; push it hard and you get the full glitchy, prismatic-edge sci-fi look. There's no AI model involved - it's straight pixel math, so it's fast and completely deterministic for a given input.

Installing it

Through ComfyUI Manager: search "WAS Node Suite", install, restart. Manually:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/WASasquatch/was-node-suite-comfyui
cd was-node-suite-comfyui
pip install -r requirements.txt

Pure image processing - no models to download, no extra dependencies beyond what the suite already installs.

Troubleshooting

This is one of the more reliable nodes in the pack precisely because it's simple; there's not much to go wrong beyond "the effect looks too strong or too weak," which is a taste call, not a bug. Turn it down if the fringing looks like a compression artifact rather than a lens effect - that's usually a sign you've pushed the offset past what looks like an actual optical flaw and into obvious-filter territory.

The one thing worth knowing suite-wide: WAS Node Suite hasn't been actively maintained since the author stepped back in December 2023. That mostly bites you at the import stage - a ComfyUI core update occasionally breaks the whole pack's startup because of a pinned legacy dependency (BLIP support is the recurring offender) - rather than at the level of an individual filter node like this one misbehaving at runtime. If the node's simply missing from your menu, check your console for an import error before assuming anything about the filter itself.