Color Management Part 24: Corporate Branding Colors and video production by Chris Zwar

Not all RGB values are the same – color management doesn’t cause problems, it fixes them

November 25, 2024

Adobe After Effects is the industry standard app for motion graphics, and yet working with color management can strike fear into the hearts of those producing video content with corporate brand guidelines.

All large companies have brand guidelines that must be followed, with strict instructions for design elements such as logos, text and colors. But keeping brand colors accurate throughout the video production process is not as simple as it might seem, and so it’s not uncommon to find motion designers and other content producers slightly terrified of doing something that might “change the colors.”

In an earlier video in this series, I said that the term “color management” means different things to different people. Before we had HDR video production, the main purpose of color management was to keep colors consistent across multiple devices, and across multiple stages of production. Although this sounds like a good thing – and really, color management is your friend – the underlying fear of the colors “changing” has meant many designers have simply ignored it all together. But as we’ll see in this video, ignoring color management can cause its own set of problems. In fact, the most common cause of color shifts in videos rendered from After Effects is just the result of expected, default behaviours. The video explains it all:

The notion that “the colors have changed” isn’t just a common fear amongst motion designers, but it’s also a very real, very common problem. I’m sure that every After Effects user has noticed, at some point or on some project, that the final renders don’t quite match what they’re seeing in After Effects. This problem, where outputs and deliveries look a bit different to the After Effects composition window, has been frequently discussed online for years. It’s quite common to hear this color shift blamed on some sort of “Quicktime gamma bug“. But although the color shift is real, it’s not the result of a bug. It’s actually to do with the way Quicktime files – especially Prores – are handled by other applications.

Once you understand the problem, it’s easy to fix – and you no longer have to worry about getting phone calls from your agency or client about the colors looking wrong.

While there is a Quicktime gamma “bug”, that’s a separate topic that others have explored in much more detail than I have. It’s also worth knowing that the “real” Quicktime gamma bug only affects those on OS X. If you’re an After Effects user rendering to Prores, then any color shifts you’re seeing are far more likely to be caused by the scenario outlined above – rendering an sRGB Prores which is then assumed to be Rec.709. And if you’re working on Windows then you can ignore any discussion about a “gamma bug” altogether.

In the very first video in this series, I mentioned how I’ve found a lot of online advice about color management to be simply wrong. Something that continues to irritate me is when people ask for help with color workflows and are told they have to buy an expensive reference monitor. While it’s always nice to own professional equipment, and a great monitor is a wonderful asset to have, simply owning a reference monitor is not going to fix any color workflow issues. You can buy the most expensive monitor on the market but that’s not going to help you if you’re rendering sRGB Prores files, or working in Rec.709 but typing in sRGB values from the corporate brand bible.

This video covers conventional video production using Standard Dynamic Range – the sRGB and Rec.709 colorspaces. Even so, there’s a lot of information here and I had to stop once it got over 20 minutes. Once we start working with ACES and High Dynamic Range, then working with branding guidelines becomes even more complex – because we don’t just have to worry about colorspace conversion, but also tone mapping. So that’s coming up next…

This is part 24 in 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