CameraIntermediate

Chromatic Aberration

A split-second RGB split on impact — for one frame, the lens itself flinches.

camerapost-processingimpactvfx

Examples

Captured from this page's own interactive demo below.

Overview

Chromatic aberration offsets the red, green, and blue channels of the rendered frame away from each other, imitating a cheap lens failing to focus all colors at one point. Films earned it by accident; games borrow it on purpose — as a PULSE: an explosion lands, the channels tear apart for a tenth of a second, then snap back together.

The shape of that pulse is everything: spike to full strength on the impact frame, then decay fast with an ease-out (quadratic works well). The player shouldn't be able to look at the effect — they should only feel that the frame itself cracked. Stack it with camera shake and a flash on the same frame and each effect makes the others read bigger.

Constant aberration is a different tool — an aesthetic (retro CRT, glitchy cyberspace, drunk or damaged states) — and an expensive one: it costs readability, and some players get genuine eye strain. If it's always on, keep it at the screen edges and offer a toggle; if it's a pulse, keep it under 300 milliseconds and no one will ever complain.

Interactive Demo

IMPACT

press Pulse · R/G/B channels tear apart, then snap back

Max Split7px

Pulse Time300ms

Use Cases

Explosions and heavy hitsTaking damageDashes and speed boostsGlitch and tech aesthetics

Best Practices

Do

✓Spike instantly and decay with an ease-out — the pulse should be felt, never watched.
✓Fire it on the same frame as the shake and the flash; simultaneous channels multiply each other.
✓Scale the strength with the event — a grenade deserves more split than a pistol shot.

Don't

✕Don't leave it always on as 'cinematic polish' — it taxes readability and some players' eyes.
✕Don't apply it to the UI layer; HUD text with split channels reads as a rendering bug.
✕Don't pair a strong split with motion blur on fast camera moves — together they turn the frame to soup.

Common Mistakes

⚠A linear decay that reads as a slow smear instead of a crack — the snap-back is the effect.
⚠Pulsing on every minor event until the game looks permanently broken.
⚠Forgetting an accessibility toggle for sustained aberration, locking sensitive players out.

Implementation

Paste this into your AI assistant (Cursor, Copilot, Claude) to add the effect to your project.

Prompt

Add the "Chromatic Aberration" game-feel effect to my project: A split-second RGB split on impact — for one frame, the lens itself flinches.

How it works: Chromatic aberration offsets the red, green, and blue channels of the rendered frame away from each other, imitating a cheap lens failing to focus all colors at one point. Films earned it by accident; games borrow it on purpose — as a PULSE: an explosion lands, the channels tear apart for a tenth of a second, then snap back together.

Guidelines:
- Spike instantly and decay with an ease-out — the pulse should be felt, never watched.
- Fire it on the same frame as the shake and the flash; simultaneous channels multiply each other.
- Scale the strength with the event — a grenade deserves more split than a pistol shot.

Avoid:
- Don't leave it always on as 'cinematic polish' — it taxes readability and some players' eyes.
- Don't apply it to the UI layer; HUD text with split channels reads as a rendering bug.
- Don't pair a strong split with motion blur on fast camera moves — together they turn the frame to soup.

Implement the effect in whatever engine/stack the project already uses and follow its existing code style. Wire it up where it makes sense.