Color Palette Workflow

Overview

The Automation Blocks script link to color palette offers a very easy and powerful color workflow in After Effects. Store your colors in one central color palette comp, then link anything in your project to it. When you modify the color palette, all linked color values in your scene update instantly.

Usage

Linking Colors (and creating palette comp)

Just select some color properties, Text layers, or Solid layers in your project and run the script. A dialog pops up where you can pick the color that you want to link to:

After you choose a color, two things will happen:

1. if there is no color palette comp in your project yet, it will create one
2. it links the selected color properties to the chosen color of the color palette

If you didn't select any color properties, but a Text or Solid layer (or several of them), it creates a fill effect on those layers and links the fill color to the palette.

Saturation & Brightness

If you change the Saturation or Brightness values in the link dialog, the linked color will not be exactly the same color as in the palette, but a modified (desaturated/darker/brighter/...) variant of it.

Changing the Color Palette

The color theme comp contains a shape layer with (by default) five shapes - each representing one of the colors in the palette. If you change the fill color of one of the shapes, all linked colors in your project change with it, instantly.

Customizations

Adding More Colors (or Changing Default Colors)

If you open the block code of the script, at the very beginning you'll see a list of the default colors of the color palette. You can change those default colors and even add more colors to the list. After you've done this, delete the color palette comp from your project (if it already has one), so that the next time you execute the script a new color palette comp (with the new colors) is created.

Customizing Name & Location of Color Palette Comp

Right below the list, where you can customize the default colors of the palette, you'll also find variables, where you can customize the name of the color palette comp and the project bin where it is located.

To store the color palette in a different bin, for example, just enter the name of that bin (or a path like /bin/subbin), or select an existing bin in your project and click the refresh icon of the Project Bin block.

Keyboard Shortcut

If you use this script a lot, note that you can also give Automation Blocks scripts a keyboard shortcut.