An innovative real-time weld monitoring technique using chromatic filtering of the thermal radiation from a weld pool is developed. The thermal radiation from the weld pool is focused on an aperture and the transmitted thermal radiation is monitored at two wavelengths with high-speed single-element detectors. Due to the chromatic aberration introduced in the focusing optics, the transmittance curve of thermal radiation varies by the wavelength. Owing to this difference in the transmittance, the local variation of thermal radiation from the weld pool can be monitored by processing the two spectroscopic signals from two detectors. In this paper, the algorithms to monitor the laser power on the weld specimen and the focus shift we investigated and the performances of laser power and focus monitoring are shown for a pulsed Nd:YAG laser welding. The monitoring of the weld pool size variation is also discussed.