If you have ever had to recolor an After Effects project, you know the drill. You dig through comp after comp, select a layer, find the fill, change it, then hunt down the next one, and the next, hoping you did not miss a stroke buried three precomps deep. On a project with any real color in it, that is an afternoon you are not getting back.
So the team built ColorMaster, a master color control for After Effects. Instead of hunting through comps and layers, you scan your project once and control every color from a single panel, with merged controls, saved color schemes, and palettes. Here is how it works.
This video may reference an older version of ColorMaster. Features and UI may have changed since recording.
What ColorMaster is: a master color control for After Effects
If you have worked with template projects, you may have seen a color control layer, one layer whose Effect Controls hold all of the project colors so you can recolor everything from a single place. ColorMaster gives you that for any project, and the difference is that it writes all of those controls for you, automatically, across a project full of layers.
It installs through Filmit Studio, the desktop app you download when you start a trial. Install Filmit Studio and it sets ColorMaster up for you along with the rest of the tools. To open it in After Effects, go to Window, then Extensions, then Filmit Studio. That panel is the launcher for every tool we make, so find ColorMaster in the list and click Open. You can shrink the Filmit Studio panel down for quick access to your tools, or close it entirely, it does not matter.
ColorMaster is a paid plugin, but it is included in the Filmit Studio subscription, one price for the whole growing suite rather than a steep fee per plugin, and that subscription is what funds the constant updates and the new tools we keep shipping. It comes with a 7-day free trial that unlocks the whole bundle, not just ColorMaster.
Scan your project and build a master color control
With your project open, click Scan Project. ColorMaster reads through everything and builds a master color control inside After Effects, a control layer whose Effect Controls hold every color in the project. You may recognize the idea from template projects, but here you did not build any of it by hand, ColorMaster wrote every control for you in one pass.
From there, working with a color is straightforward. Right-click any color in the panel and choose Jump to layer, and ColorMaster takes you straight to the layer that uses it, so you can see exactly what you are about to change before you change it. Adjust the color from the panel and it updates in the comp. There is also a history panel built into ColorMaster, so you can step back through your changes and never lose a color you liked.
Pro Tip: Recolor freely. Because every change is tracked in the history panel, you are never one click away from losing good work, so it is worth trying the bold version of a color before you settle on the safe one.
Merge colors into clean, manageable controls
A real project has a lot of individual colors, and a fresh scan surfaces all of them, which can feel like a lot at first. That is exactly what merging is for. Select several colors, right-click, and choose Merge selected, and from then on they are all driven by one control, so you change it once and every merged color moves together.
Want to tidy the whole thing at once? Click Merge at the bottom of the panel and ColorMaster consolidates every similar color in the project down into clean, manageable controls. If you change your mind, right-click a merged group and ungroup it straight back to individual colors. Nothing is locked in.
Non-destructive and safe to hand off
This is the part that matters most for client work. Whenever you scan, ColorMaster creates a Filmit Color Master folder and a set of control layers, and every color is driven by standard After Effects expressions. Because those expressions live inside your project, the controls keep working even if you hand the file to an editor who does not have Filmit Studio. They can still update and drive the colors, exactly as you set them up.
It is also safe to run on top of work you have already done. If a project already has a template color control, ColorMaster scans above it and creates non-destructive expressions that respect whatever you built. It is not going to destroy a control you pre-built for a client. (And if it ever does, the team wants a bug report so we can fix it.)
Pro Tip: Not every color sits where you expect. In one template the visible text color was actually a pre-fill underneath, so use Jump to layer to confirm which control really drives what you see before you commit to a change.
Save color schemes: default, dark, light, and brand
ColorMaster saves multiple color schemes, or modes, per project. Out of the box you get default, normal, dark, light, and black and white, and you can add your own, say a brand mode for a specific client. Switch to a mode, recolor the project the way you want that version to look, then switch to another mode and set it up differently. ColorMaster remembers every color for every mode, so a single switch recolors the entire project.
This is what makes it so good for brand-agnostic animations. You can build one animation and keep a completely different brand look under another mode, then re-skin the whole thing per client just by switching modes. The color schemes can be totally different from each other, and ColorMaster holds all of them for you at once.
Pro Tip: Build the animation once, then give each client their own mode. When the next client comes in, you switch modes instead of rebuilding, and the entire project recolors to their brand in a click.
Build and apply palettes
ColorMaster also has a palette mode. Build palettes out of the colors you actually use, click plus to add swatches, pick your colors, and save the palette. Then apply a saved palette to pull those colors in whenever you need them. If you keep a set of brand colors on hand, a ten-color palette is one click away every time you start a new piece.
Scale to projects with thousands of colors
To show it holds up, I opened a random downloaded template, the kind of busy, messy project that is all over the place, and ran Scan Project on it. ColorMaster scanned and linked all 2000+ colors, then merged them down into a scheme I could actually manage. On a project that big it takes a moment, it has to write all of those expressions in the background, and that is completely normal.
After that it is the same workflow as any other project. Jump to a color, change it, and start saving your looks into modes, a normal version, a dark version, whatever the piece needs. Even a template with thousands of colors becomes something you can recolor from one panel.
Key takeaways
ColorMaster turns recoloring an After Effects project from a comp-by-comp hunt into one panel that controls every color.
Scan Project builds a master color control that holds every color in your project, so you recolor from one place instead of digging through comps and layers.
Merge selected colors or click Merge to consolidate similar colors into clean controls, and ungroup back to individual colors any time.
Expression-driven controls live in the project and keep working for editors without Filmit Studio, and scanning respects any color control you already built.
Keep default, dark, light, black and white, and custom brand modes per project, plus reusable palettes, and switch modes to recolor everything at once.
It links and merges 2000+ colors from a busy template into a scheme you can actually manage, right inside After Effects.
Get started with Filmit
ColorMaster installs through Filmit Studio, the desktop app you download from your dashboard to manage every Filmit plugin. It comes with a 7-day free trial that unlocks the whole bundle, and one install puts ColorMaster in After Effects and keeps it current. ColorMaster is an After Effects tool, and the same subscription also covers our plugins for Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve, along with a full suite of effects and presets, all included.
Start a free trial, install ColorMaster, and scan your first project. If you hit a snag or want a feature added, the team is on Discord for questions and feedback, and we update the tools based on what people ask for.
