Can no longer change Theme UI Color in After Affects?

[drewc15557864]

Hi:

Up until the latest update (2025) for After Effects. I was able to change my Theme UI Color. This link shows a video of how you used to able to change the Theme UI Color: (Mod note: Link removed)

I contacted an Adobe Agent and he said several changes were included in this latest update of After Effects. He said to file a feature request here in hopes of getting that feature back again. The After Effects Version I am using is: 25.0.0 (Build 53) and I am running it on a PC with a Windows 11.  This may not seem like a big issue to some people but it's something I got used to as part of my workflow.  If you could bring this feature back it would greatly be appreciated!

Mod note: Please do not condone the use of internal engineering tools like Console. The link showing how to change engineering settings in the UI has been removed. The text was also modified. Thanks.

[Warren Heaton]

The October 2024 (25.0) release uses Adobe's Spectrum UI.  As far as I am aware, prior modifications to the UI are no longer available. .

[Warren Heaton]

Multi-frame render cut render time in half.  Not sure why you haven't seen similar results.  

I've also found 24.x to be the most stable release yet.  

[drewc15557864]

Well, I sure hope Adobe brings back that UI option. I guess I will have to get used to seeing that boring "default blue" again:( 

[MATEUSENKE]

If a large number of Adobe subscribers complain, maybe they will bring back the option to change the color of the panel and customize it as they like, we just need to know where to complain about this.

[drewc15557864]

I contacted Adobe Support yesterday 12/5/2024.  The option to change your theme color has been removed from After Effects.  The tech I talked to had no idea why they removed it.  I could have worked my way up the chain of command to try and get a real answer. However, I do not think I would get a better answer. More importantly, if and when it will be brought back (if thats even possible)? I guess for now, we are stuck with the three "Primitive" options.  

[Warren Heaton]

@drewc15557864 

As mentioned earlier in this support thread, it's due to the change to Spectrum UI across the Adobe applications.

Even thought it was not officially supported in the prior versions, it was nice to be able to change it and it would be great to see this in a future version - but we need to let the After Effects team know it's important and that requires a feature request with a good number of votes.

[magical_style1939]

I can't wait for it! Hopefully, they'll fix it in the next update.

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi @drewc15557864,

I upvoted your feature request. On behalf of all users, I agree that releasing this functionality would be ideal. I'd love the feature myself. Please get your colleagues, friends, and family press the upvote button in the upper left corner of the post. The same request is being made for other applications using the new Spectrum UI, like Premiere Pro. Thanks raising the issue.

Cheers,
Kevin

[drewc15557864]

Thanks Kevin:

It's nice to see my original post is getting noticed. Let's hope it gets
seen by the right people:)

[nsorce]

Can we pin this reply so that it can be at the top of the section? 

[jefubbudu]

Is it possible there could be some formal separation on this site between devs and user only forums? A lot of replies here boil down to "this is a user only forum, don't expect adobe employees to help"... and then sometimes they just pop up and say "oh yeah we worked on that a little a while back" and leave, and honestly for a subscription, it's insulting that neither the support lines have been able to help me more than once from a dozen tries, nor have responses in forums worked to solve more than half of the serious issues I see brought up. 

Many discussions are about hardware choice or tips and tricks, or troubleshooting, but things like bug reports, asking adobe to support international standards, or answers to why certain parts were coded in certain ways or discuss alternatives to RAM preview, should be in a "developer response zone"  where devs can give context to why things are the way they are at least. 

https://youtu.be/Cr0xIvHx5J8?si=CcTR-RqnYBSc8-76

I mean only the first 30 seconds of this. The stuff not about business practices, but about the state of adobe software in the minds of its users. I don't think the practice of silence only when someone mentions something that needs to be worked on is a functional community outreach method, nor does a lack of xontect or reason make it easier to accept suboptimal software.

We know it's slow. It runs like tar. Giving users a cold shoulder when they ask why the software they use to afford food is worse than a decade ago, is an easy way to come off as uncaring, or even malicious.

[Warren Heaton]

@jefubbudu 

As mentioned earlier in this support thread, not being able to change the theme UI color in After Effects is due to the change to Spectrum UI across the Adobe applications.

This is the appropriate place to let the After Effects team know it's important.   As of Friday, January 3, 2024, we're at 20 votes.

While issues come up now and again and my personal feature wish list is pretty long, I have seen very good improvements in After Effects over the past several versions.  I'm not sure why your experience is so poor by comparison.

[jefubbudu]

@Warren Heaton I am a VFX editor, and my computers are high core count, with small, hyperthreaded cores for simulations. As well, this is the 5th computer I have used adobe production software on. The best was CS3 on a school word processing computer with 4GB of ram, circa 2009. I then got my own computer with 8GB of vram in 2011, along with CS6. I was rendering 3D models in it by combining 6k textures on a 4k canvas, then incorporating greenscreen, and it ran fine. The second worst was on a school mac pro, on which the software crashed every 12 minutes, but was not always slow, in 2015 The worst was on a modern 2017 with 32GB of vram. I'm still using that one, partially because my employer watched me work remotely, and was fed up of paying me to wait for previews to load, and canceled every VFX shot, deciding it would not hit even imaginary deadlines. That is my experience

I can render a cloud and simulate light propagation in blender using a raspberry pi, then output it as MP4 on 1GB of RAM, and bring it back into the software to edit as a video clip, including nuke-like node based VFX scripts. Modern After effects takes over 6000% as many resources at minimum spec. Software doesn't get slower if it's properly maintained. It gets faster.

I think it's pretty telling that in my 15 years of using the software it's only gotten slower and laggier, faster than moore's law. In 5 years it'll be unusable, and as of 2 years ago it became totally unprofitable to use, and my director actively called it "trash software if it can't handle a layer group or 5"

But more on topic, this entire situation is exactly why it's slow. Why was UI the focus, and not Deep image compositing? Was converting more effects to use GPU or be 16 bit not important? Why did the UI need to change? Who asked for it? Was there public outcry because it was too bright or dark before? Was it too fast, and needed to slow down? Were people asking for more dropdowns or a bigger, chunkier header? The people who decide what happens, what goes into it, what is worked on, how many workers need to do things... seem to be the businessmen, managers, marketing, and shareholders, not the devs or artists. That's the primary difference. If blender works so well with its devs not even knowing each other by name, and most being unpaid, Adobe has no excuse,  seeing as blender and After Effects are the same age, and are subject to the same kind of technical debt.