What type of aberration results in color fringing around images?

Chromatic aberration is the type of optical distortion that causes color fringing around images. This phenomenon occurs because lenses have different refractive indices for different wavelengths of light. As a result, when light passes through a lens, the various colors do not converge at the same point, leading to a failure to focus all colors of light together. This manifests as noticeable fringes of color, typically seen at the edges of objects or bright light sources in an image.

In contrast, other types of aberrations like spherical aberration affect the sharpness and clarity of the image but do not primarily cause color fringing. Coma leads to a comet-like distortion that affects point sources of light, while astigmatism results in various focus points for horizontal and vertical lines, contributing to blurriness rather than color separation. Thus, the characteristics of chromatic aberration specifically account for the appearance of color fringing in images.