A Pixel’s Journey Through After Effects

A Pixel’s Journey Through After Effects

Join me now as we follow color through After Effects,
noting the various features that can affect its appearance
or even its very identity—its RGB value. Although it’s not
mandatory, it’s best to increase that pixel’s color fl exibility
and accuracy, warming it up to get it ready for the trip, by
raising project bit depth above 8 bpc. Here’s why.
16-Bit-Per-Channel Composites
A 16-bit-per-channel color was added to After Effects 5.0
for one basic reason: to eliminate color quantization, most
commonly seen in the form of banding where subtle gradients
and other threshold regions appear in an image. In 16
bpc mode there are 128 extra gradations between each R,
G, B, and A value contained in the familiar 8 bpc mode.
Those increments are typically too fi ne for your eye to
distinguish (or your monitor to display), but your eye easily
notices banding, and when you start to make multiple
adjustments to 8 bpc images, as may be required by Color
Management features, banding is bound to appear in edge
thresholds and shadows, making the image look bad.
You can raise color depth in your project by either
Alt/Option-clicking on the color depth setting at the
bottom of the Project panel or via the Depth menu in
File > Project Settings. The resulting performance hit
typically isn’t as bad as you might think.

Most digital artists prefer 8 bpc colors because we’re so
used to them, but switching to 16 bpc mode doesn’t mean
you’re stuck with incomprehensible pixel values of 32768,
0, 0 for pure red or 16384, 16384, 16384 for middle gray.
In the panel menu of the Info panel, choose whichever
numerical color representation works for you; this setting
is used everywhere in the application, including the Adobe
color picker . The following sections use
8 bpc values despite referring to 16 bpc projects.