Charles Poynton provides an excellent set of resources on his website regarding color technology and color terminology.
Color depth and high dynamic range color
Color depth (or bit depth) is the number of bits per channel (bpc) used to represent the color of a pixel. The more bits for each RGB channel (red, green, and blue), the more colors each pixel can represent.
In After Effects, you can work in 8-bpc, 16-bpc, or 32-bpc color.
In addition to color bit depth, a separate characteristic of the numbers used to represent pixel values is whether the numbers are integers or floating-point numbers. Floating-point numbers can represent a much larger range of numbers with the same number of bits. In After Effects, 32-bpc pixel values are floating-point values.
8-bpc pixels can have values for each color channel from 0 (black) to 255 (pure, saturated color). 16-bpc pixels can have values for each color channel from 0 (black) to 32,768 (pure, saturated color). If all three color channels have the maximum, pure-color value, the result is white. 32-bpc pixels can have values under 0.0 and values over 1.0 (pure, saturated color), so 32-bpc color in After Effects is also high dynamic range (HDR) color. HDR values can be much brighter than white.
Setting the color depth and modifying color display settings
The color depth setting for a project determines the bit depth for color values throughout a project.
To set the color depth for a project, do one of the following:
Alt-click (Windows) or Option-click (Mac OS) the Project Settings button in the Project panel.
Choose File > Project Settings or click the Project Settings button in the Project panel, and choose a color depth from the Depth menu.
You can specify a color depth for each render item, which overrides the project color depth when rendering for final output. You can also specify the color depth to use for each output item in the output module settings. (See Render settings and Output modules and output module settings.)
To change the format in which color values are
shown in the Info panel and in some effect controls, choose an option
such as Percent or Web from the Info panel menu. Choosing Auto Color
Display automatically switches between 8 bpc, 16 bpc, and 32 bpc,
depending on the color depth of the project. Though many effects can work with all color depths, some effects work only with lower color depths. You can set the Effects & Presets panel to only show effects that work with your current project color depth. (See Effects & Presets panel.)
This video from the After Effects CS5: Learn By Video series provides an introduction to color channels and color bit depth, and it shows how choosing the right color bit depth can often eliminate banding in gradients.
Comparative advantages of each color depth
The dynamic range (ratio between dark and bright regions) in the physical world far exceeds the range of human vision and of images that are printed on paper or displayed on a monitor. Low dynamic range 8-bpc and 16-bpc color values can represent RGB levels only from black to white, which is only a small segment of the dynamic range in the real world.
High dynamic range (HDR), 32-bpc floating-point color values can represent brightness levels much greater than white, including objects as bright as a flame or the Sun.
Set the project color depth to 32 bpc to work with HDR footage or to work with over-range values—values above 1.0 (white) that aren’t supported in 8- or 16-bpc mode. Over-range values preserve the intensity of highlights, which is as useful for synthetic effects such as lights, blurs, and glows as it is for working with HDR footage. The headroom provided by working in 32 bpc prevents many kinds of data loss during operations such as color correction and color profile conversion.
Because 16-bpc frames use half the memory of 32-bpc frames, rendering previews in a 16-bpc project is faster, and RAM previews can be longer than in a 32-bpc project. 8-bpc frames use even less memory, but the tradeoff between quality and performance can be obvious in some images at a project color depth of 8 bpc.
Special considerations for working with high dynamic range color
You can use the HDR Compander effect to compress the dynamic range of a layer with an HDR footage item as its source. In this way, you can use tools that don’t support HDR color, such as 8-bpc and 16-bit effects. When you’re done, use the HDR Compander to undo the dynamic range compression. The HDR Highlight Compression effect lets you compress the highlight values in an HDR image so that they fall within the value range of a low dynamic range image.
Because we can see only a subset of the luminance values in a real-world scene in an HDR image on a monitor, it is sometimes necessary to adjust the exposure—the amount of light captured in an image—when working with an HDR image. Adjusting the exposure of an HDR image is like adjusting the exposure when photographing a scene in the real world, allowing you to bring detail out of very dark areas or very bright areas. You can use the Exposure effect to change the color values of a layer for final output, or you can just adjust the exposure in a specific viewer for preview purposes.
Additional resources about high dynamic range color
Jonas Hummelstrand provides a collection of resources for understanding and using HDR color in After Effects on his General Specialist website.
Chris Meyer explains what floating-point, 32-bpc, HDR color is good for in a video overview on the Lynda.com website.
Kert Gartner provides some visual examples and a brief explanation on his VFX Haiku website that demonstrate the benefits of working with 32-bpc color.
Andrew Kramer provides a video tutorial on his Video Copilot website in which he demonstrates the advantages of using 32-bpc color with motion blur.
On his fnord website, Brendan Bolles explains how to use the Color Profile Converter effect and film color profiles to adjust colors and perform tone mapping to make an HDR image appear as if it were shot on motion picture film.
Select a color or edit a gradient
In many contexts, you can click an eyedropper
button 
to activate
the eyedropper tool, or you can click a color swatch to open a color
picker. If you use the Adobe Color Picker, you can also activate
the eyedropper from the Adobe Color Picker dialog box.
If you click a gradient swatch for a stroke or fill in a shape layer, or click Edit Gradient in the Timeline panel, the Adobe Color Picker opens as the Gradient Editor, with additional controls for editing gradients included at the top of the dialog box.
Andrew Devis shows how to modify gradient fills and strokes for shape layers, plus other options, in a video on the Creative COW website.
- A.
- Opacity stop
- B.
- Color stop
- C.
- Opacity midpoint
- D.
- Eyedropper
- E.
- New-color rectangle
- F.
- Original-color rectangle
Choose a color picker
Choose Edit > Preferences > General
(Windows) or After Effects > Preferences > General (Mac OS),
and do one of the following:To use the color picker provided by the operating system, select Use System Color Picker.
To use the Adobe Color Picker, deselect Use System Color Picker.
Jeff Almasol provides the PickerSwitcher
script on his redefinery website, which toggles
the Use System Color Picker setting. Use this script when you prefer
to use the Adobe Color Picker for certain tasks, but the operating
system color picker for others, and want a quick way to change this
setting. This script works especially well in conjunction with the
LaunchPad panel, with which running the PickerSwitcher script is
as easy as clicking a button. To download the LaunchPad script,
go to the After Effects Exchange on the Adobe
website.Edit a gradient
A gradient is defined by color stops and opacity stops. Each stop has a location along the gradient and a value for color or opacity. The values between stops are interpolated. By default, the interpolation is linear, but you can drag the opacity midpoint or color midpoint between two stops to alter the interpolation.
Using Adobe Kuler swatches in After Effects
Adobe provides the Swatch You Want script in a package of scripts for After Effects on the After Effects Exchange on the Adobe website. The Swatch You Want script imports and converts Adobe Swatch Exchange (.ase) files for use in After Effects.
Jerzy Drozda, Jr. provides a video tutorial and example project on his Maltaannon website that show how to copy and paste from the Adobe Kuler desktop application to bring color swatches into After Effects.
Mathias Möhl provides a script on the After Effects Scripts website with which you can load and use Kuler color themes. Mathias also provides a tutorial on the AETUTS+ website that demonstrate how to use Kuler with After Effects.
Jorrit Schulte provides a tutorial on the AETUTS+ website that demonstrates how to make an animation preset for importing and working with Kuler color swatches.
Color correction, color grading, and color adjustment
When you assemble a composition, you often need to adjust or correct the colors of one or more of the layers. Such adjustments can be for any of several reasons. Some examples:
You need to make it seem as if multiple footage items were shot under the same conditions so that they can be composited or edited together.
You need to adjust the colors of a shot so that it seems to have been shot at night instead of day.
You need to adjust the exposure of an image to recover detail from the over-exposed highlights.
You need to enhance one color in a shot because you will be compositing a graphic element over it with that color.
You need to restrict colors to a particular range, such as the broadcast-safe range.
The terms color correction and color grading are often used interchangeably, though the term color grading is sometimes used to refer distinctly to color adjustments made for creative purposes rather to correct problems with color. The term color correction is used in the broad, general sense in After Effects.
After Effects includes many built-in effects for color correction, including the Curves effect, the Levels effect, and other effects in the Color Correction effects category. You can also use the Apply Color LUT effect to apply the color mappings in a color lookup table for color correction purposes. (See Color Correction effects and Apply Color LUT effect.)
The Camera Raw plug-in can be used to correct and adjust still images in JPEG, TIFF, and various camera raw formats.
The Synthetic Aperture Color Finesse plug-in included with After Effects includes excellent color-correction tools. After Effects CS6 includes Synthetic Aperture Color Finesse 3. (See Resources for Synthetic Aperture Color Finesse.)
Additional resources for color correction and adjustment
This article on the Adobe website collects several video tutorials and other resources for color correction and color grading in After Effects and Premiere Pro.
John Dickinson provides visual aids on his Motionworks website that illustrate how to use the Curves and Levels effects for color adjustments:
This video from After Effects CS5: Learn By Video series shows how to combine motion tracking and rotoscoping to isolate and selectively color-correct an actor's face.
The Rebel CC animation preset is a simple, telecine-style color-correction tool for coloring or grading a movie. This animation preset uses expressions to control the Levels (Individual Controls) effect. To learn more and download the animation preset, see Stu Maschwitz's ProLost blog.
Stu Maschwitz provides a post on his ProLost blog that discusses color correcting for skin tones, with links to some resources about test setups that show various skin tones on a vectorscope.
Mark Christiansen provides tips and detailed techniques for color correction, color adjustment, and color matching in the “Color Correction in Adobe After Effects” chapter of After Effects Studio Techniques on the Peachpit Press website.
Rich Young collects tutorials and presets for bleach bypass, cross-process, and other looks in an article on the ProVideo Coalition website.
Using histograms to adjust color
A histogram is a representation of the number of pixels at each luminance value in an image. A histogram that has nonzero values for each luminance value indicates an image that takes advantage of the full tonal range. A histogram that doesn’t use the full tonal range corresponds to a dull image that lacks contrast.
A common color-correction task is adjusting an image to spread out the pixel values more evenly from left to right on the histogram, instead of having them bunched up at one end or the other. Applying the Levels effect and adjusting its Input White and Input Black properties in the histogram is an easy and effective way to accomplish this task for many images.
Resources for Synthetic Aperture Color Finesse
The Synthetic Aperture Color Finesse plug-in included with After Effects includes excellent color-correction tools. Synthetic Aperture provides tutorials and additional information about using Color Finesse on their website.
Color Finesse installs its documentation in the plug-in’s subfolder in the Plug-ins folder. After Effects CS6 includes Synthetic Aperture Color Finesse 3. (See Plug-ins.)
Color models and color spaces
A color model is a way of describing color using numbers so that computers can operate on them. The color model used within After Effects is the RGB color model, in which each color is described in terms of amounts of red, green, and blue light added together to make the color. Other color models include CMYK, HSB, YUV, and XYZ.
A color space is a variant of a color model. A color space is distinguished by a gamut (range of colors), a set of primary colors (primaries), a white point, and a tone response. For example, within the RGB color model are several color spaces, including—in decreasing order of gamut size—ProPhoto RGB, Adobe RGB, sRGB IEC61966-2.1, and Apple RGB. Although each of these color spaces defines color using the same three axes (R, G, and B), their gamuts and tone response curves are different.
Though many devices use red, green, and blue components to record or express color, the components have different characteristics—for example, blue for one camera is not exactly the same as blue for another camera. Each device that records or expresses color has its own color space. When an image moves from one device to another, image colors may look different because each device interprets the RGB values in its own color space.
Color management uses color profiles to convert colors from one color space to another, so colors look the same from one device to another.
Online resources about color models and color spaces
Adobe provides a white paper on color spaces and color management in After Effects, on the Adobe website.
Charles Poynton provides an excellent set of resources on his website regarding color spaces, color management, and other color technology.
Christopher Nevison provides an article on the Colgate University website that explains and describes the uses of the RGB, CMYK, HSL, HSB, and YCbCr color models.
Harry Frank provides a video tutorial on his graymachine website that shows how and why to use color conversion expressions to convert colors from the RGB color model to the HSL color model when randomly varying colors. The specific example that he shows uses the Radio Waves effect.
Gamma and tone response
The tone response for a color space is the relationship of light intensity to the signal that creates or records (perceives) the light.
The human visual system does not respond linearly to light. In other words, our perception of how bright a light is does not double when twice as many photons hit our eyes in a given time. Similarly, the display elements of a CRT monitor do not emit light that is twice as bright when a voltage twice as great is applied. The relationship of light intensity to signal intensity for a display device is expressed by a power function. The exponent of this power function is called gamma. In general, the relationship of light intensity to signal intensity for an input device is the inverse of the relationship for an output device, though the gamma values may differ for input and output devices to accommodate the difference between scene lighting and lighting of the viewing environment.
Charles Poynton provides an excellent set of resources on his website regarding gamma and other color technology.
Linear tone response: when gamma equals 1
Raising any number to the power of 1 gives the original number as a result. A gamma of 1.0 is used to express the behavior of light in the natural world, outside the context of our nonlinear perceptual systems. A system with gamma of 1.0 is sometimes said to operate in linear light, whereas a system encoded with a gamma other than 1.0 to match the human visual system is said to be perceptual.
If you have enabled color management (by specifying a working color space), you can perform all color operations in linear light by linearizing the working color space. A linearized color space uses the same primaries and white point as the nonlinear version; the tone response curve is just made into a straight line.
Many compositing operations, such as combining
colors with blending modes, benefit from being performed in a linear
color space. For the most natural and realistic blending of colors,
work in a linear color space. If you have not enabled color management,
you can still perform blending operations using a gamma of 1.0.
(See Linearize working space and enable linear blending.)System gamma, device gamma, and the difference between scene and viewing environment
The gamma value for an entire system—from capture, through production, to display in the viewing environment—is the product of the gamma values used for each of the phases in the system. This product is not always 1.0, as it would be if the operations performed for encoding exactly matched (inverted) the operations performed for decoding. One reason for a system gamma other than 1.0 is that a difference often exists between the lighting conditions in which a scene is captured and the lighting conditions in which it is viewed. (Consider that you usually watch a movie in a dim environment, but the scenes aren’t normally shot in a dim environment.)
For example, the device gamma for an HD camera is approximately 1/1.9, and the device gamma for an HD display is approximately 2.2. Multiplying these values gives a system gamma of approximately 1.15, which is appropriate for the somewhat dim television viewing conditions of a typical living room. The system gamma for motion picture production is much higher (approximately 1.5–2.5) to accommodate the darker viewing environment of a movie theater. The gamma for the film negative is approximately 1/1.7, and the gamma for the projection film is approximately 3–4.
Color profiles are said to be scene-referred if their tone-response curves are based on the conditions in the typical scene. Color profiles are said to be output-referred if their tone-response curves are based on the conditions in the typical viewing environment.
By default when you use color management, After Effects automatically adjusts the contrast of images when converting between scene-referred color profiles and output-referred color profiles. This automatic conversion (image state adjustment) is based on the gamma values specified in the HDTV video standard.
To disable this automatic color transformation, deselect Compensate For Scene-referred Profiles in the Project Settings dialog box (File > Project Settings).
The Compensate For Scene-referred Profiles feature also exists in Adobe Photoshop CS4 and later, but this feature does not exist in other applications. To match the colors in other applications—including After Effects CS3 and earlier—disable this automatic conversion. When you open a project created in After Effects CS3 or earlier, the Compensate For Scene-referred Profiles option is deselected.
Each instance of the Color Profile Converter effect can also be set to either compensate for scene-referred profiles, not compensate for scene-referred profiles, or use the setting indicated by the project’s Compensate For Scene-referred Profiles option. (See Color Profile Converter effect.)
For an in-depth description of the automatic compensation for scene-referred profiles, see the Adobe website.
For additional information about the compensation for scene-referred profiles, see this blog post by Todd Kopriva and Peter Constable on the Adobe website.
Trish and Chris Meyer provide an article on the ProVideo Coalition website that adds some practical information regarding scene-referred and display-referred color profiles.
QuickTime and gamma in non-color-managed projects
After Effects 7.0 and earlier used QuickTime codecs to decode several kinds of media, and the gamma adjustments performed by QuickTime on Windows were different from the gamma adjustments performed on Mac OS. The gamma adjustments performed by After Effects CS3 and later differ from the gamma adjustments performed by these QuickTime codecs. Gamma adjustments performed by After Effects CS3 and later on Windows are the same as gamma adjustments performed by After Effects CS3 and later on Mac OS. Also, by not using QuickTime codecs, After Effects preserves over-range values in 32-bpc projects.
Select Match Legacy After Effects QuickTime Gamma Adjustments in the Project Settings dialog box to accomplish any of the following:
Avoid color shifts when working with projects created in After Effects 7.0 or earlier
Match the colors in a project created in After Effects 7.0 or earlier
Ensure that colors in the Composition panel match colors in QuickTime player
The Match Legacy After Effects QuickTime Gamma Adjustments option is selected by default for projects created in After Effects 7.0 or earlier. You should create new projects without this option selected.
For information on issues related to QuickTime Player and gamma adjustments, go to the Adobe website.
Trish and Chris Meyer provide tips for dealing with gamma issues with QuickTime and H.264 on the ProVideo Coalition website.
