The illustration explains the physical foundations of the new method by showing a light path through the microscope from the light source (left), via condenser, specimen, objective and detector. The lenses of the microscope split the white light into individual wavelengths. The different colors of light are then brought to focus at different distances from the lens. This effect is called chromatic aberration and it manifests itself as "fringes" of color along boundaries that separate dark and bright parts of the image. In the illustration, chromatic aberration is depicted as red, green and blue light going astray. As the light wave passes through the specimen, its phase changes (shown in the illustration by way of example for the red light). By introducing a commercially available camera able to capture color as a detector, red, green and blue images are captured separately. The phase shifts introduced by the specimen can now be computed from these separate images using an AI model.