ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Purple fringing

Okay kiddo, so have you ever seen a picture where some parts of it have a weird purple or pink color around the edges? That's called "purple fringing."

It happens because of something called chromatic aberration. Basically, when light passes through a camera lens, the different colors of light can bend or separate. This can cause the colors to not line up perfectly when they hit the camera's sensor or film, and can create a purple or pink color where they overlap.

It's kind of like when you use a magnifying glass to look at something really close. You might notice that the edges look a little blurry or rainbow-colored. That's because the magnifying glass is bending the light waves in different ways, just like a camera lens does.

Sometimes purple fringing can be fixed in editing software, but it's always best to try and prevent it as much as you can while taking the picture. One way to do that is to use a lens with better optics, or to avoid taking photos in bright sunlight or with a lot of high-contrast areas.

Overall, purple fringing is just a little annoyance that can happen in photography, but it teaches us about how light behaves and how our tools can affect the way we see things.