After Effects

In After Effects versions up to 2024 it was possible to enable UI theme colorizingvia internal console/debug settings (theme colorizing).Starting from AE 2025 this functionality has been removed or disabled,and there is currently no way to customize UI accent / highlight colors.This negatively affects:– readability for long sessions– accessibility (eye strain, color sensitivity)– user workflow consistency across versionsRequest:Please restore UI theme color customization (even as an experimental or advanced option)or officially expose it in Preferences → Appearance.This feature already existed and worked before AE 2025. 

Right now copying and pasting layers is dependant on selection order. So if I select my layers from bottom and up, then pasting them will result in them being pasted in reverse order. I would like an option in the preferences to say 'Always paste layers in layer order' or something, so that copying and pasting never happens based on selection order and layers are always pasted in the order they are already in my timeline. Hope it makes sense. Thanks.

We want to hear your ideas about how we can improve After Effects. Your opinion is very important to us and the ideas provided here regularly appear in future versions. When posting an idea, here are a couple of things to keep in mind:   How will the idea help your workflow?  You're the expert on your workflow, so tell us how your idea would improve your workflow. What problem are you having today that the idea could solve? That helps us understand your idea better. It also makes it easier for us to follow up with you to get more info on your idea.    One idea per thread If you've got two (or more!) ideas, make each of them a separate thread. Doing this will allow others to vote on a single, specific idea and not confuse up-votes amongst a list of feature requests.   Enlist support! If you feel strongly about a feature, and you know other people do too, get them to vote on it.   

Basically works the same as “Create Shapes/Masks from Text”, but can be used on layers with multiple Mask paths..

As a Photoshop user for several decades, I encountered a structural issue after using After Effects for only a short period of time that I find difficult to understand.When a precomposition contains multiple layers using blending modes such as Multiply and Screen, enabling Collapse Transformations allows those internal blending modes to interact correctly with layers in the parent composition.However, as soon as a Track Matte is applied to the entire precomposition, that pass-through blending behavior is effectively lost.Collapse Transformations and Track Matte are both standard features, and After Effects allows them to be enabled together in the UI. Yet combining them effectively disables an important behavior of one of those features.Photoshop already supports the equivalent concept through Pass Through groups + group masks: internal layers can continue blending with layers outside the group while a mask is applied to the group as a whole.So why is the equivalent structure not possi

Respect the macOS System Settings preference under System Settings → Appearance → Click in the scroll bar toJump to the spot that’s clicked — when this system option is selected, clicking anywhere in the scrollbar track should immediately move the scrollbar thumb to that position, rather than paging up or down.Ideally, both After Effects and Media Encoder should respect the user's existing system setting instead of requiring a separate preference. This would provide a more intuitive and efficient way to navigate long panels and lists.

It would be fantastic if Adobe could open up the color space setting to be modifiable via the C++ SDK. Obviously these are quite new features, but they are not currently exposed to the SDK. I’m working on a plugin to take out the hard part of handling colorspace for artists so they can worry about the work and not the science.NamelyProject - color ENGINEProject - OCIO configProject - working spaceProject - display spaceFootage items in project panel - colourspaceThank you 🙏🏼

The user selects or imports a screenshot containing text. The panel analyzes the letterforms in the image. It searches for visually similar fonts. It displays the closest matches and allows the user to apply or activate the selected font in After Effects.Its Match font, but in after effects.

The current construct of Open Recent is dated and lacks appreciation of how users use the app -  we work on multiple projects at once we create multiple project versions - a strong aversion to losing work is high on everyone’s agenda When coupled, these two realities mean that the Open Recent feature’s options to display only the last 10 projects is hugely lacking.  I’d like the feature to be more contextual - each project and its variants will have its own submenu with up to 10. We can continue with the current 10 recent projects but these are really, really 10 different projects and not variants. On project names with more variance than baseName + numbered suffix, I believe users will be forgiving if the app treats them as a separate project and this is acceptable for projects involving language variations where the baseName may differ. But for general use-cases, once the baseName is identical and only the numbered suffix varies, they should be treated as the same project, with varia

It’s 2025. I open After Effects and… it feels like I’m still working in 2013.While Blender, Unreal Engine, Houdini, and even newer tools like Cavalry are evolving with bold updates, After Effects has barely moved. Every time a new version drops, it’s disappointing to see tiny improvements disguised as “major features.” It’s as if Adobe is keeping the program on life support without actually developing it.Let’s call it out: Graph Editor – still outdated, clunky, and untouched for over a decade. No real-time preview, no modular behavior, no intelligent UI. No modern easing tools – no built-in bounce, elastic, inertia, or overshoot. You still need to rely on Expression tricks or 3rd-party scripts for basic animation finesse. No native effectors or procedural animation tools – while tools like Cavalry, Cinema 4D, and Notch offer real-time procedural workflows and effectors, After Effects is stuck in manual keyframes and precomp hell. Still no native IK (inverse kinemati

For some time now we have had roundness control on shapes within Illustrator and Photoshop, and that hasn't necessarily disseminated properly down to AFX. When drawing a square mask with round corners, you get one shot when you create the mask, and then that control is gone. If you created a square mask, there's no way to then create rounded corners. Why not instead of having two square mask options, having a rounding control like Illustrator to be able to round all corners, and be able to lock those controls for each corner together, or be able to adjust them independently?If this could also be added to other shapes of masks too - even better!We have roundness for parametric rectangles in shape layers, so why not masks?  Additionally, this is only a simplified roundness that affects all corners. Again, we should be able to disconnect this and have per-corner roundness control on shape layers too.

The title says it all. Auto-save should function in the background and NOT pop up with an annoying progress bar every time it runs. Gets REALLY bad on large project files when auto-saves take up to a min every single time.Total workflow killer. Should be just like taking snapshots of your project in the background while continue working.The dialog even pops up and steals focus from another app you're in.

I use After Effects for compositing my 3D renders, and I always export 16 or 32 bit EXRs, starting to use ACES. Unfortunately, many, many effects are still only 8 bit, some support 16, and some can do 32. If you don't want to lose me and many other compositors (at least those that are left), please update more effects to 32bit!

This might be a long shot and I dont know if its technically possible to implement, but I think this would be a major improvement to after effects as a whole. I think the easiest way to explain it is looking at the dynamic link feature between premiere and AE, but from AE projects to AE projects.I would have plenty of usecases for this and I it would elevate professional workflows into new heights.Just like having your own library of functions in coding, that you can link in multiple scripts, updating or adding new logic to the source function which automatically integrates in the scripts where its linked to. In this case the function would be an After effects project that you can reuse and implement in other projects and automatically updates in all linked projects if theres changes to the master project.Reallife example: I have a beverage flatlabel that I wrap around a beverage can with UV Map. I use this Label in multiple projects, since theres plenty of different campaigns and

Reporting this as a bug since I can’t see that’s it’s a “feature” or has any use whatsoever. Enabling time remapping on a layer automatically places a keyframe at the in and out points of a layer. Great. Except that the keyframe at the END of the layer apparently does NOT hold the last frame when that layer is extended in time -- simply dragging out the out point of the layer means you will get empty black frames. In order to FREEZE the final frame of a layer, such as for a hold, it’s necessary to step one frame back, set ANOTHER keyframe, then delete the auto created one. Then dragging the layer out will hold the final frame as expected. I’ve never, ever had a scenario in 25 years of work in animation where I’ve wanted a time remapped layer to behave the way that it does by default, and it becomes tedious having to deal with this over and over, and sometimes even gets overlooked then resulting in headscratching as to why, e.g., a precomped layer that’s been time remapped upsteam then

It would be really helpful to be able to animate seeing both at the same time...

As it stands, there’s no easy method to export a single frame from multiple comps. The only Time Span options that can be saved to Render Setting templates are Length of Comp and Work Area. I’d like options such as:First FrameLast FrameA specific frameCustom durations for movies If I could add a handful of comps to the render queue and choose one of my templates set to “Last Frame”, that would be very convenient than manually opening each comp and using Save Frame As.

There must be a reason that After Effects can only have one project open at a time, but this  is the single biggest issue for me. Importing comps is messy, it often ends up importing the entire project. Every other program I use allows to copy and paste between projects within the app, and even between apps (Ae to Pr, PS, Ai, Ai to PS...) but Ae doesn’t allow this seemingly simple feature. Thank you.

Sometimes I need to align many key frames of same layer or even another layer to the same momment in timeline, well you can select keyframes in same vertical level and align all of them to the same second…  

How can we pay so much for Adobe products and we cannot do simple hair animations with After Effects, considering that free apps can do this (with use limitations, but still). When we will have that available for us to use? And without that credits crap that Firefly is trying to pull on us? Why, instead o making our lives easier and less angry using AE, we still need to use mesh tool to animate hair? How Adobe's AI didn't reach out to this level of technology yet for the users?

Many years ago, I did a request on the now-defunct AE uservoice for the opposite of a ‘guide layer’ - a ‘render only’ layer, for this situation:If I have an effects-heavy adjustment layer that I don’t want to preview because it’s so slow, I’ll turn it off in my comp. Then when I’m happy, I’ll set the comp to render. I’ll then check that exported .mov/mp4/etc, and get annoyed because I then realise that I forgot to turn that adjustment layer back on before I set it rendering, so I then have to do another render.Sound familiar? If we could set a layer to “render only”, then it would remain turned off until we did the final render. The exact opposite of a Guide Layer.Let’s get this upvoted and implemented (after all these years!!).This is along the lines of an age-old question from this forum:  

I think I may have suggested this many years ago, but it's worth another go:What are the chances of seeing a character/paragraph style palette in AE? I'm sure I'm not alone in finding the method of copying/pasting a bit of text from a "desired" style into a new text layer, before deleting it and pasting/typing some unformatted text, so it matches the desired style. With the introduction, some time ago, of the ability to access text styles/fonts/etc via scripting/expressions, I'd have thought it wouldn't be too hard to implement an InDesign/Illustrator character style palette. Wouldn't that be nice? (I know I could probably do this using mogrt templates and things, but that's an awkward and time-consuming workaround).

I’d like to see AE have the ability to ignore missing frames in a sequence in the same way that Nuke can do it. Currently we have two options when importing e.g. animation that’s been rendered on twos for previewing. We can ignore missing frames and have the hideous missing footage screen show every other frame, making previewing impossible. Or we can import sequences on twos with “Force Alphabetical Order” enabled, which removes the first problem but then does not respect frame numbers. Neither is very user friendly. Nuke has an option to just ignore missing frames such that a sequence can be viewed with missing frames simply holding from the last available image in a sequence. 

I’ve been using a competing vector program for creating braille signage and wondered if there was any plans on having this be something Illustrator or Indesign could incorporate natively so that I can stop using the other program entirely?  The workflow currently with adobe products is:go to some conversion web page like brailletranslator.orgpaste text in for the conversion, copy resultsgo back into my Indesign doc using a braille font with a CA Standard paragraph style (that I’ve created) This works for making 1-10 signs, but I’d prefer to have this be something I was able to merge from a CSV file as we typically need to create 100 individual signs at a time--which the competing program will also not do. It does however have a TEXT TO BRAILLE and BRAILLE TO TEXT option from the TEXT menu and a panel that looks a little like this:   

After Effects should allow users to add multiple instances of the same Layer Style—such as multiple strokes, inner shadows, drop shadows, glows, and overlays—and freely drag them into any order.Photoshop already supports stacking several instances of certain Layer Styles, but After Effects limits each layer to one of each style and uses a fixed render order. Currently, achieving these looks requires duplicating layers or repeatedly precomposing, which makes projects cluttered and harder to edit.Please make Layer Styles stackable, reorderable, and saveable as presets while keeping the original text, shape, or layer fully editable.