Colors appear lighter on the same project file on AE 2021 and AE 2019. Please help!

[ethancandelario]

Hello all,

I packaged a project I'm working on from my desktop machine running 16.1.3 to work on while out of town on my laptop running the latest version of AE. On my desktop the file appears correctly, but on my laptop, it appears (and renders) much lighter. Screenshots attached.

https://imgur.com/a/G69PtdJ

This is super frustrating, as there are no changes I can find between the two except for the AE version. I installed 17.0 (the oldest version available on CC) on my laptop as a temporary workaround, and it works there, but I would like to know what the actual problem is as this project will be a template and rendered by multiple people across a couple of machines.

There are no third party plugins, so I would be happy to provide the project file if anyone would like.

Thanks so much!

[Roland Kahlenberg]

There are different areas in AE where Color Management takes place -
Project Settings

View Menu>Use Display Color Management
View Menu>Simulate Output

And of course when rendering you can choose a Color Profile in the Output Module's Color Management tab.

Ensure these are consistent across both systems. If these still fail then you'll want to check your monitor settings on both machines to ensure they're consistent. HTH