color shift when importing Illustrator to After Effects

[Bassem Akl]

hello, i know its very late but did you find any solutions for your problem ? i am facing the same issue

thanks!

[Brendan Reilly]

Yes. Under FILE, set the DOCUMENT COLOR MODE in Adobe Illustrator to RGB COLOR. That fixes the issue when bringing the graphic into After Effects. For some reason, the color fluctuation occurs when the vector image is left in CMYK color.

[Bassem Akl]

the document in illustrator is already set to RGB colour mode, and the colours in aef and ai have the same hex code yet in aef its very bright compared to ai.. I am really confused with this..

[David Ells]

Thanks Zac(k). Both of you had the solution to my problem. I just spent 1.5 hours on the phone with Adobe, one from AE and the other from Illustrator and they both just told me that color synchronization between applications was not possible due to the difference in architecture and color modes that they each use. I was very frustrated. I wish I had spent a little more time googling to save me this time. Not happy with Adobe support right now at all.

[Richard Ducasse]

This comment and the following 2 helped me figure out how to fix this for my Illustrator file. It was already in RGB mode, but one color looked very wrong after import to After Effects. In Illustrator, when I selected it, it was labeled as a “Pantone color”. So I selected all the shapes that had that same dark blue, then I clicked the Palette icon; clicked the Options icon, and selected RGB to convert it. Then it matched the same RGB color in After Effects.

So even though the RGB numbers looked correct in Illustrator, they did not match an RGB solid of the same blue in After Effects. I had to go back in Illustrator and select that one color that was a Pantone or “Spot color” to individually convert it to RGB. Just having the whole document set to RGB did not properly convert that color. It had to be done manually in the Palette menu.

I also spent an hour searching on Adobe’s website and it did not help. This seems like a bug in Illustrator.

[Ray Lux]

I know this is old but I just solved a similar problem using CC 2019 versions of both AI and AE.

When creating shapes from vector AI layers in After Effects… the resulting shapes would be a different color even though the hex codes were the same.

If you go into File – Project Settings – COLOR – and uncheck LINEARIZE WORKSPACE ….

the colors will return to normal.

There were absolutely no answers for this anywhere online but now there is.

Cheers.

Animator, Designer, Comedy Writer, Tree Climber, Ufologist

[Kyle Robinson]

Definitely found this helpful. I thought changing the CMYK to RGB in the colour panel would be enough. It wasn’t, but this was the fix!

[Cain Czopek]

Thanks Ray!

This totally directed me into the right direction. Every time I rendered my AE file the colors were desaturated compared to my AI vector graphics and what I was seeing while editing in AE. It turns out my color working space was canon C log 2 instead of sRGB. Rookie mistake, but your post pointed me in the right direction so, thank you!

Cain