After Effects now has OpenColorIO and ACES built in. While that is great news for digital artists, it also poses a small problem.

Although After Effects has had its own color management system since CS4 was released in 2008, anyone wanting to use OCIO and ACES needed to use a more complicated workflow involving plugins, adjustment layers and guide layers.  All of this has been covered in detail in this series on color management. But in addition to the videos in this series, there are also loads of other articles & tutorials out there, all covering different approaches to using OpenColorIO & ACES in After Effects.

The problem we have is that After Effects 2023 has made them all outdated.

The way that Adobe has implemented OCIO is very similar to the existing ICC system (which you can learn about here). But because it’s now all built-in, using OCIO is much simpler than it used to be.  Most importantly – we no longer have to use plugins for OpenColorIO, and we don’t need to bother with adjustment layers and guide layers.

It’s easy to overlook how simple the new system is, compared to the older workflows that needed a lot of manual juggling.  But old habits die hard, and anyone who gets a bit mixed up and combines the new built-in system with old, outdated advice will run into problems.

So let’s have a quick look at how the built-in OpenColorIO system works in After Effects 2023:

This is so important I’m going to emphasise the main points:

OpenColorIO & ACES are BUILT IN!

NO Plugins

NO ACES downloads

NO Adjustment Layers

NO Guide Layers

NO “Preserve RGB” on everything

Are you wondering what all the fuss is about?  This video – part 12 in the color management series – introduces ACES and explains why it’s so significant.

This is part of a long series on color management.  If you’ve missed the other parts, you can catch up here:

Part 1: The honeymoon is over

Part 2: Newton’s Prisms

Part 3: It’s all in the brain

Part 4: Maxwell’s spinning discs

Part 5: Introducing CIE 1931

Part 6: Understanding the CIE 1931 chromaticity diagram

Part 7: Introducing gamma

Part 8: Introducing Colorspaces

Part 9: The theory of a color managed workflow

Part 10: Using After Effects built-in color management

Part 11: Introducing OpenColor IO

Part 12: Introducing ACES

Part 13: OpenColorIO and After Effects

Part 14: Combining OCIO with After Effects

Part 15: Logarithmic file formats

Part 16: RAW video files

AND – I’ve been writing After Effects articles and tutorials for over 20 years. Please check out some of my other ProVideo Coalition articles.