Defringe

Defringe is an Advanced Editor brush that removes chromatic aberration — the saturated red, green, and blue dots and hairlines that longitudinal (axial) CA leaves on out-of-focus highlights. Think of the bright color speckles on a spider-web junction, a glassy specular reflection, or the filaments of a backlit fungus.

Advanced mode. The Defringe button appears in the Editor header only in Advanced mode. If you don’t see it, flip the Standard / Advanced switch at the top-right of the Editor. See Editor overview.

Press D in the Editor to open it. Entering is all the key does — a second D does not apply, since Apply bakes pixels; use the Apply button, or Esc to cancel. Because Defringe is Advanced-only, D does nothing in Standard mode. The key is remappable, and the toolbar button shows its current binding. (In the Library, D is the add/remove-from-selection key — the two never overlap.)

Why it’s a brush, not a slider

The false color from CA and the genuine fine color in your image are inseparable across the whole frame — a single global “defringe everything” control would mute real color everywhere. So Defringe is a local tool: you brush roughly over the artifact, and Macro Studio neutralizes the color only there.

What it does (and doesn’t do)

Defringe is chroma-only. Inside each brush stamp, color that strays from the local background is pulled back toward it, while brightness and detail (luma) are left untouched. That’s the key difference from Spot Correct or Retouch: it doesn’t paint over or clone anything, so it won’t smear texture or erase real structure like web strands. The trade-off is a faint neutral (gray) residual where a bright colored artifact used to be — usually much less distracting than the original fringe.

Those leftover neutral spots can usually be removed completely with a quick follow-up pass of Spot Correct: defringe first to strip the color, then spot-heal the remaining gray speck.

Using the brush

Open a result in the Editor and click Defringe in the header.
Left-drag across the fringe to paint. Unlike Spot Correct (one spot per click), Defringe paints continuously as you drag — natural for tracing a colored line or covering a speckled patch.
Repeat over each fringed area. You don’t need to be precise; brushing roughly over the artifact is enough.

While the brush is active, a row just below the image lists the navigation controls:

Action	Control
Paint	Left-drag
Pan	right-drag, ⌘-drag / Ctrl-drag, or a drag with the hold-to-pan key. That key is configurable — Spacebar (the default), ⌥/Alt, Shift or ⌘/Ctrl — so ⌥-drag pans only while ⌥ is the one selected; ⌘/Ctrl-drag and right-drag always pan
Zoom	Scroll
Resize the brush	[ / ], or ⌘+scroll / Ctrl+scroll

The toolbar carries an Adjustments checkbox — see Your adjustments while you work — and shows the brush size beside its slider — the radius in image pixels, 4–200, so the number stays put when you zoom. The zoom readout sits in the bottom-left corner of the canvas; click it to pick a magnification directly. A plain click on it never paints.

Undo and redo work per stroke (⌘Z / Ctrl+Z, and ⇧⌘Z / Ctrl+Shift+Z), and Esc exits the brush.

Apply commits your strokes to the result and records each one as a step on the image’s edit history. So Apply isn’t a point of no return: ⌘Z / Ctrl+Z outside the editor steps your strokes back one at a time, and each shows as its own row in the HISTORY timeline. Nothing touches the file on disk until you Save.

Your adjustments while you work

The canvas shows the image with your Adjustments applied — so the fringe you are neutralizing is the one that will be in the saved file, at the colour and brightness it will actually have.

Colour is neutralized on the raw pixels underneath either way. Adjustments are non-destructive: they sit on top of the image and are applied again every time it is drawn or saved, so your masks, sliders and crop stay live through a Defringe session. Nothing is baked in twice.

This is the one tool where you may well want it off. White balance, vibrance and saturation change exactly the purple and green cast you are hunting — a strong saturation setting can make a faint fringe look worse than it is, and pulling saturation down can hide one you would still see in the file. Untick Adjustments in the toolbar — or press A — to judge the fringe on the raw pixels. The setting is remembered between sessions and is separate from Retouch’s and Spot Correct’s, so you can leave it off here and on there.

With Adjustments on, the canvas redraws at a reduced size first and sharpens up the part you are looking at a moment later — the same thing the main Editor canvas does. You will see it as a brief softness after a zoom or a pan, never while painting.

Tips

Zoom in first. CA fringe is small — zoom to 100% or more so you can see exactly what you’re neutralizing.
Match the brush to the artifact. A brush much larger than the fringe neutralizes color over a wider area than you need; size it down (⌘/Ctrl+scroll) for tight lines.
Reach for it when global tools can’t help. If desaturating or shifting color across the whole image would hurt your subject, Defringe is the targeted alternative.