Maintaining colors in After Effects

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1

Hi people,

I’m finding myself growingly irritated at trying to maintain correct looking colors through a motion design workflow.
What I do: Copy RGB Values from a Figma library, use them in After Effects and immediately they look different (brighter, less saturated) from the ones in the Figma board. Now I’ve tried anything in after effects (no color management, color management, srgb, rec709, rec709 2.4 Gamma and even trying to convert the color space through adjustment layers but I just cannot get correct looking colors out of after effects, neither through h264, h265 or even ProRes 4444 rendering. I also switched in Figma between sRGB and P3 display colors.

Anyone got an idea on why this happens and how to professionally avoid it? Thanks for all ideas, sorry for all information you would’ve needed I didn’t include yet.

Cheers

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Hey @migge , thank you for reaching out! I am checking internally if there are any workarounds for this. Will give you an update once I get a response, appreciate your patience!

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Hey @migge sorry for the delayed update, the team said you need to check if your Figma file is set to P3 color profile vs sRGB. You can read more information in our Help Center article: Manage color profiles in design files.

Since you mentioned that you “switched between sRGB and P3 display colours in Figma”, I have created a support ticket on your behalf. Your ticket has the number #929203, for reference. Our technical quality team will look into the ticket.

It will be helpful if you can send a direct link to the file to our support team, and invite support-share@figma.com with “can edit” permission so they can look into this further. Note that users with @figma.com emails on your team do not count towards your billing.

Let me know if you have any further questions.

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Thank you a lot for getting back to me! I was in the hospital for a week, but I will get a recording of the behaviour and all additional information you asked via mail to you on Monday! REALLY appreciate the extra effort on display here!

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Hey @migge sorry to hear this, wishing you a speedy recovery!

No worries at all, thanks again for your help, you can take your time no pressure, when you’re ready you can send the screen recording to our support team, they’ll be able to help you out further.

Let me know if you need any further assistance.

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@migge I also am in the exact same boat.
Sounds like we both have have had to explore this mismatch endlessly.

Please let me know what the solve is for this, as I would find the answer to be incredibly life improving.

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Same issue here. All my layers in After Effects look slightly washed out. My Fig project is in HEX, my AE project is in HEX. I just copied the codes so not sure why its occurring. Any news on a fix yet? This seems to be the top thread on google for this issue…

@Gayani_S what is the significance of the Fig Color profile settings (sRGB and P3) in relation to the HEX color codes in the inspector when an element is selected? Does sRGB vs P3 effect the HEX colors?

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Ok i think i found a workaround for this. For some reason it seems to work even though the resulting color codes from using the AE eye dropper tool, dont match the original Figma color codes;

-Exported your Fig image as a PNG.
-Open it in an image previewing app (Mac Preview, etc)
-Select the AE layer you want to edit the color of
-Go to the Effect Controls (or whichever method you are using to color your AE layers)
-Use the eye dropper tool in the color picker panel to select the appropriate colour in the PNG image

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Okay I spent hours testing and i think i finally solved it, for now. These are just notes I took.

@Josh_Smith I think that will work too.

What i did was make sure my working space in After Effects was Display P3. If you are on Mac, this is an option. On Windows you will have P3 DCI Gamma 2.6.

If your Windows monitor isnt capable of P3 viewing, you will be somewhat working in the dark. One way to find out is looking at Preferences>Color Profile in Figma. It will say if your monitor will interpret those ranges.

You can get a preview of a close match on Windows by going to view>Use Display Color Management, then simulate Apple RGB (Output Profile.) It’s not perfect, and colors wont match perfectly on non P3. If you are viewing on a non-P3 monitor then you may certainly just have to either trust this process or send to a Mac or similar P3 monitor.

H264 will always be a smaller range of colors. Quicktime, ProRes 442, 4444, etc. preserve P3 colors on export, but filesizes are massive. H264 can be close though. Color-pick the colors that stand out after exporting (preferably on a Mac or P3 monitor.)

When you export, an H264 in Media Encoder, look under video and check Mastering Display Color Volume. It should say P3D65. Lum min .0005. Lum max 1,000. CLL 1,000. Average 200. I have no idea what these mean.

Take note of this–
If you take your export from After Effects to Premiere, it seems that it will read P3 working space (it will look right in Premiere), but there is no way to export P3.

What I had to do was export my project from Premiere to After Effects and render from Media Encoder.

I still can’t see if my colors are correct on my Windows, but it seemed to work when built it on PC, and viewed the export on a Mac.

The above information could be useful. No one has commented on a solve, so I am just giving up info that can be built upon. I hope this helps and that we all have less P3 compatability nightmares. Good luck.

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