color shift when importing Illustrator to After Effects

[Ricardo Aragão]

I was having a similar, if not the same, problem. And it had all to do with the transparency in my illustrations. As I pressed Cmd + D in my Illustrator file, I could see there was no real white background for the image, although it seemed to.

My solution was simple: change the After Effects composition setting to have a white background.

Hope it helps someone. And sorry for any english mistake.

[Perry Kroll]

I know this thread is really old, but I’m adding this in because it’s the first thread that comes up in Google for a problem that I think a lot of people are having.

When importing AI files to After Effects, the colors are coming out shifted.

The solution, which I found after much digging, is:

Open the file in Illustrator.

Select everything in your document

Choose Edit > Edit Colors > Convert to CMYK.

This will convert spot colors to process colors.

[Wilson Costa campos]

ok after running into this problem none of the solutions above worked for me.
but the following worked for me.
The illustrator document i was working was on cmyk mode and changing to RBG didn’t solve. I copied the HEX value and deleted all the colours from the appearance sub-menu which can be found under window. I copied the (colourless) shapes into new RGB file and gave them HEX values and done!
This happened with a logo with only 2 colours so it was easy to change the HEX values.

[Ricardo Aragão]

This (changing do CMYK) just make the color more intense, but not right (for me). Thanks for trying to help anyway.

NEW SOLUTION (worked for me):

The problem was all about the color profile. Once I’changed the color profile (Edit>Assign Profile..) to sRGB IEC61966-2.1, Illustrator file’s colors looked just the same as it looked in After Effects composition.

I didn’t want to recolor everything though. What I did was create a new Illustrator file with sRGB color profile assigned, then copied everything in the troubled file and pasted in the new file with “Paste Remember Layer” (in Layers’ Panel’s options) checked to preserve all my layers’ structure.

It worked! After Effects recognize the colors now.
Hope it helps someone.

[Jimmy Wanamassa]

This did the trick for me. I was trying to get a colored gradient background into Premiere from Illustrator. Saved as .eps but had to remove Include CMYK PostScript in RGB Files.

[Zakaria Ounis]

I had the same issue, i changed the color mode from the File> Document color mode, this worked once for some files but for some other files it didn’t, so i think i discoverer the problem which was in the swatches, when i double clicked on one of the colors this brought the swatch options i found out the the color mode for this color was set to CMYK although the AI file is set to RGB so going through each color swatch and setting it to RGB solved the problem for me hope someone might find this useful

[Val Denelia]

Thank you so much for this!
Was driving me mad

[Mike Price]

Thanks, Erick, you helped me big time!!!

Setting Ideas Into Motion

[Zach Prichard]

THANK YOU!

While the other workarounds worked as, well, workarounds. This actually solved the problem. I just went into my swatch palate, went into the generic “swatch options” menu and changed CMYK to RGB and it worked!

Was driving me nuts since I knew I had color mode set to RGB and it still wasn’t working.

THANKS!

[Matt Reinbold]

Just another solution in case the above didn’t fix the problem. I had the same issue above, even after converting the .eps to RGB under File >>> Document Color Mode.

I found the crux of my issue. When saving your .eps, there is a tick mark, that may be automatically selected based on the project, that says “Include CMYK PostScript in RGB Files.” Turning this off, in addition to changing the the document Color Mode, should fix nagging issues of a file’s colors importing incorrectly to After Effects.