You control color management for each footage item using the Interpret Footage dialog box.

You can prevent the conversion of colors into the working color space for a single footage item by selecting Preserve RGB in the Color Management tab of the Interpret Footage dialog box. This option preserves RGB numbers; color appearance is not preserved. Turning off color management for a specific footage item is useful when the footage item is not intended for visual display, but is instead intended for use as a control layer—for example, a displacement map.

The input color profile determines what calculations are performed when converting the footage item’s colors into the project’s working color space. If a working space has not been set—that is, if color management is not on for the project—then you cannot assign an input color profile.

In some cases, files that you import will have ICC profiles embedded in them. When you import these files, you can be confident that the colors that you see are as the producer of the footage originally intended. After Effects can read and write embedded color profiles for Photoshop (PSD), TIFF, PNG, and JPEG files.

If a footage item does not have an embedded color profile, you can assign an input color profile using the Interpret Footage dialog box or by adding or modifying a rule in the interpretation rules file (interpretation rules.txt). After Effects interprets the footage item as if the source footage was created using this color profile, so be certain to assign a profile that matches (or at least approximates) that used to create the source footage.

Non-RGB footage items (e.g., CMYK, Y'CbCr, and camera raw images) cannot be assigned an input profile. Their native color space is displayed in the Interpret Footage dialog box. Conversion of non-RGB color values to RGB color values is handled automatically for each format.

If you don’t assign an input color profile, and After Effects doesn’t have a rule in the interpretation rules file with which to make an interpretation, the footage item’s colors are assumed to be in the project’s working color space.

When color management is enabled, a footage item’s input color profile is shown in the information area at the top of the Project panel.

The Interpret As Linear Light option determines whether the assigned input color profile is interpreted as being linear (gamma equals 1.0). This option also works when color management is turned off for the project. (See About gamma and tone response.)