Home Wikituition Browse all terms Categories
Random term
Optics, Lenses & Filters

Onion-ring Bokeh

Concentric rings visible inside out-of-focus highlights, caused by tooling marks on a moulded aspherical element.

In depth

Precision-ground aspherics are smooth, but the cheaper moulded and hybrid variants used in many modern lenses can retain microscopic circular ridges from the manufacturing process. These are invisible in the sharp parts of the image but are magnified into visible rings within defocused specular highlights. Nothing in processing removes them.

Examples in practice

Christmas lights behind a subject render as discs filled with faint tree-ring patterns rather than smooth circles.