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BeratGL
BeratGL
Known Participant
October 15, 2026
Open for Voting

Color Picker Dialog goes beyond the valid 0-255 value for RGB values

Just to test. I went to 2 million value and also went negative -23.000 value. Not an Ae expert but I’m sure this is not normal. There is no limiter to any of these values when they are supposed stay between 0-255. Exact same bug exists on Premiere as well.

 

System info
    Application: After Effects v26.5.0 (build 89)
    OS: Windows v10.0.26200, RAM: 31.82 GB GB, CPUs (logical): 24 
    GPU: Rtx 3060 Ti  Nvidia Studio Driver ver. 617.42

    4 replies

    Paul+Conigliaro
    Paul+Conigliaro
    Participant
    October 16, 2026

    Hi ​@BeratGL! Can you check the bit depth for your project? It’s at the bottom of your Project panel. If it says 32 bpc, these are expected ranges for color channels. 8 bpc is the more typical 0-255 range. 16 bpc will allow 0-32,768. There might be times when you want more fidelity in your colors and 16 and 32 bpc allow for that.

     

    -Paul, After Effects Engineering Team

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    BeratGL
    BeratGLAuthor
    Known Participant
    October 16, 2026

    Hey, the bit depth is 8 bpc. 

     

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    Paul+Conigliaro
    Paul+Conigliaro
    Participant
    October 16, 2026

    Asking around internally, it looks like this is actually intentional. The reason being if a project bit depth is changed from 32-bit to 8- or 16-bit, we want to preserve the original values so they’re not clamped when changing back to 32-bit. If the color value inputs were clamped in lower bit depths, someone might unintentionally change a color to a much lower value and get an unexpected result at 32-bit again.

    Regarding negative numbers, that’s also intentional for 32-bit. This can help in compositing when something might actually be at a negative value because of underexposure for example. Then if it’s composited with an Add blending mode over something brighter, it will correctly lower the brightness of those pixels.

    But I do agree this is confusing at first. When I first learned about all this as an AE user it took me a while to wrap my head around it.

    -Paul, After Effects Engineering Team

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