Creating A Chromatic Aberration Gizmo

I created a chromatic aberration gizmo called Aberrator for a project I was working on recently.  Creating my own tools inside of Nuke is something I've been wanting to do for a while so I decided this was the time.

The UI has simple and easy to understand controls.  It contains sliders for both horizontal and vertical separation of channels.

The first part of creating the gizmo was setting up the mechanics behind the aberration.  I used shuffle nodes to separate the red from the green and blue channels and then some transform nodes to control their offsets.

I expression linked the transform x & y values to the parent controller. Then I multiplied the red by 0.5 and the green and blue by -0.5 to get an even offset.

Next I brought in a second input for a masking option and set it up to run correctly via the merge.

Finally I brought the alpha from the original image back on top so there wouldn't be any issues with losing mattes.

This was a great start to making tools in Nuke and I am continuing to develop these skills as well as this tool.  Follow for more to come!