UI Animation After Effects Tutorial: Color Correction Slider

Ok, I admit, it isn’t often your project has a color correction slider. And it’s probably even less often that you’d be online searching for for how to animate one, but just in case the perfect storm has transpired, I’m answering that question today.

The beauty of these ‘color correction’ UI animations is that After Effects recognizes Photoshop adjustment layers. This is awesome because then all you have to do is design as you normally would in Photoshop, bring it into Adobe After Effects, and animate your UI.

In putting this together, I couldn’t find a complete breakdown of Photoshop adjustment layers supported by After Effects on a straight import. So, I went through and tested them all. Below are the SHOCKING results. Ok, it’s not really that shocking, they’re pretty much just results with zero shock.

Photoshop Adjustment Layers that Work

• Brightness/Contrast
• Levels
• Curves
• Exposure
• Vibrance
• Hue/Saturation
• Color Balance
• Black & white
• Channel Mixer
• Invert
• Posterize
• Threshold

Adjustment Layers that do not work (and how to recreate it in After Effects)

• Color Fill (use layer style)
• Gradient Fill (use layer style)
• Pattern Fill (nope)
• Color Lookup  (wtf is this thing?)
• Gradient Map (kinda, with various effects)