What you'll learn
The full pipeline from raw anime footage to a finished grade: what color correction actually means, how to read Lumetri Scopes to fix white balance, common mistakes that destroy image information, why 16-bit matters, how to add procedural film grain, where to source clean footage, and a practical color theory exercise for training your eye.
Color Correction vs. Color Grading
Color correction and color grading are two separate stages that happen in sequence — confusing them is one of the most common beginner mistakes.
Color correction is the technical repair phase. The goal is a neutral, accurate image: skin tones are correct, whites are white, blacks hold detail. You are removing the problem, not adding style.
Color grading is the creative phase. Once the image is neutral, you deliberately push colors in a direction — warmer, cooler, desaturated, high contrast — to match the emotional tone of the edit. You are adding the style on top of the corrected base.
Always correct before you grade. Grading on top of a broken image means your stylistic choices are fighting the original problem rather than building on a clean foundation.
Phase 1 — Color Correction and White Balance
What color correction is
Color correction is the process of preparing raw footage so it becomes a neutral starting point. The most common task is fixing the white balance — footage shot or encoded with a warm or cool bias needs to be pulled back to neutral before any creative grade is applied.
Fixing a warm scene with Levels and Lumetri Scopes
Create an Adjustment Layer above the footage (Layer → New → Adjustment Layer). Apply Effect → Color Correction → Levels to the adjustment layer.
Open Lumetri Scopes (Window → Lumetri Scopes). Switch the scope display to Parade (RGB Parade). The Parade graph shows the red, green, and blue channels as three separate columns side by side. If the footage is too warm (orange/yellow cast), the red column will sit noticeably higher than the green and blue columns.
In the Levels effect controls, switch the channel dropdown from RGB to Red. Lower the Output White value of the red channel until the red column in the Parade graph aligns with the green and blue columns. The image is now neutralized.
Avoiding crushed values
As you move the Levels sliders, watch the Parade graph carefully. If you push a channel too far, the highlights (top of the graph) will hit the ceiling and flatten — this is called clipping. The shadows (bottom) can equally be pushed to zero and flatten — this is called crushing. Both destroy image information permanently: detail that disappears in the Parade graph is gone and cannot be recovered downstream.
Move sliders gradually and stop as soon as the waveform shapes stop changing — that is the point at which you have hit the ceiling or floor.
Working with compressed anime footage
Anime footage distributed through streaming services or re-encoded video is heavily compressed. When you try to brighten dark areas or lift weak values, compression artifacts — blocky macroblocking and color noise — become visible because the encoder discarded that information.
The cleaner approach is to lower the dominant colors rather than lifting the weak ones. If the image is too warm, pull the red channel down rather than pushing the blue channel up. Subtracting from the strong channel avoids amplifying the noise floor that lives in the weak channels.
Setting the project to 16-bit
By default, After Effects projects run at 8 bits per channel. At 8-bit, each color channel has 256 possible values. When you apply color corrections that stretch or compress the tonal range, gaps open up in those 256 values and produce color banding — visible hard steps between tones rather than smooth gradients.
Switch the project to 16 bits per channel: go to File → Project Settings, click the Color tab, and set the Depth to 16 bits per channel. At 16-bit, each channel has 32,768 values, and banding becomes invisible. Do this at the start of every project before placing any footage.
Phase 2 — Color Grading
Grading with Lumetri Color
Once the footage is corrected to a neutral base, add a second Adjustment Layer above the correction layer. Apply Effect → Color Correction → Lumetri Color.
In the Lumetri Color controls:
- Saturation — increases overall color intensity across the image.
- Vibrance — increases saturation selectively, targeting desaturated colors more than already-saturated ones. This protects skin tones from going oversaturated while still enriching the overall palette.
- Color Wheels — use the Shadows, Midtones, and Highlights wheels to push specific tonal ranges toward a hue. A slight blue push in the shadows and a slight orange push in the highlights is a common cinematic starting point.
- Curves — the most precise tool. The RGB curve controls overall contrast; individual R, G, B curves let you shift hues at specific luminance ranges.
The direction you push these controls is determined by the emotional tone you are going for: cooler grades read as melancholic or tense, warmer grades read as nostalgic or intimate.
Adding film grain
Procedural film grain in After Effects:
- Create a new Solid (Layer → New → Solid, any neutral color).
- Apply Effect → Noise & Grain → Fractal Noise.
- Set Fractal Type to Basic, Noise Type to Spline.
- Increase Contrast to push the noise toward pure black and white.
- Reduce Scale to make the grain fine rather than chunky.
- Alt/Option-click the Evolution stopwatch and type the expression:
time * 30— this randomizes the noise pattern on every frame so the grain flickers naturally rather than sitting static. - Set the solid layer's Blending Mode to Overlay or Soft Light.
- Reduce the layer Opacity to taste (typically 10–25%).
Pre-compose the grain solid so you can re-use it across multiple compositions.
Source Quality and Workflow
Never download footage from social media
YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok re-encode every upload, often multiple times at low bitrates. The resulting files contain severe compression artifacts, reduced color depth, and destroyed fine detail. Trying to color correct this material is fighting a losing battle — the information simply is not there.
For AMV work, source anime footage from Blu-ray rips. Sites like nyaa.si host lossless or high-bitrate remuxes of Blu-ray releases. These files are large but preserve the full image quality that color correction requires. The difference between a corrected Blu-ray source and a corrected YouTube rip is immediately visible.
Accurate preview with the right media player
Media players like VLC apply their own color filters and gamma corrections during playback, which means what you see in VLC does not reflect the actual file contents. This makes evaluating color accuracy impossible.
Use a color-accurate player like djv for any footage you are inspecting before or during color work. It displays the file as-is, without any processing applied.
Color Theory Exercise
This exercise builds the observational skill required for intentional color grading.
- Find a high-resolution still from a film with a strong color identity. The website Evan E. Richards hosts color-accurate film stills.
- Open the still in Photoshop. Place it on top of a neutral gray background layer (RGB 128, 128, 128).
- Using the Eyedropper Tool, sample five dominant colors from the image — one from the deepest shadow, one from the brightest highlight, and three from the dominant midtone hues.
- Paint five swatches of those colors next to each other on the gray background.
Look at the five swatches in isolation. They will communicate a mood: a set of muted blue-greens and dusty browns reads entirely differently from a set of candy pinks and pale yellows. The colors do not need to be identified by name — the feeling they create together is what you are training yourself to notice.
Repeat this exercise with films that have contrasting aesthetics. Over time, you build an intuition for what color relationships produce what emotional responses, and you can apply that same intentionality to your AMV grades.
