kickaha: (Default)
kickaha ([personal profile] kickaha) wrote2009-02-23 06:24 pm

Does this ever happen to the visual designers out there?

So I'm doing a presentation, and one of my graphics that I'm using everywhere is two concentric circles, one orange, one green. I haven't been able to get them to line up on the same center point.

It's been driving me NUTS - Keynote shows them aligned, they don't look right, they're always just a *little* bit off.

I fix it, I use it elsewhere, it's off.
I go back to the original, it's off.
I fix it, I come back to it, it's off.
I finally just chalked it up to a rendering bug.

I just figured it out.

It's chromatic aberration in my glasses - if I'm not looking at it dead center, it curves the two colors slightly differently, and the two circles are no longer on the same center point.


*headdesk*

[identity profile] georgmi.livejournal.com 2009-02-23 11:38 pm (UTC)(link)
(Points and laughs)

Physics is cool, though, isn't it?

[identity profile] kickaha.livejournal.com 2009-02-24 12:29 am (UTC)(link)
Heh, yeah. It's rare that I run across two colors so intense right next to each other to trigger this. Neon signs do it all the time, but that's a known context. This one was facepalmy good.

[identity profile] georgmi.livejournal.com 2009-02-24 12:40 am (UTC)(link)
Not just intensity, but also the fairly significant difference in wavelength--the closer the wavelengths, the less noticeable the CA.

Reducing CA is one of the reasons why good photographic lenses are so expensive. But you probably already know that.