It's a circular gradient because at heart, it started out as a color-cycling plugin and the circle was the best way to generate seamless cycles.

 

As for precision, add the shift key when dragging the color points to snap to compass points. You can even snap two triangles to the same compass point, and set one on the right and one on the left, once you get the hang of the shift key. You can always undo to get a triangle back to a previous point. Multiple undos are supported.

 

Command-drag a triangle to copy it... and add the command key after you start dragging to turn the triangle into a sampler tool... useful for "gamma-style" adjustments between any two colors. 

There's a lot of functionality in that little circle if you are willing to dig a little. :)

Brian

 

------ Original Message ------

From: "Robert Kjettrup" <robert@stvmayday.dk>

To: "After Effects Mail List" <AE-List@media-motion.tv>

Sent: 1/22/2014 6:08:11 PM

Subject: Re: [AE] Re[2]: [AE] Colorama

 

Colorama is quite a powerful tool to remap channels with a gradient and use other channels to drive it... 

But just like Andrew i really dont like that Colorama uses the default terrible OS colorpicker instead of the much nicer Adobe one. 

And the not very good UI design of the circle color ramp (sorry Brian), it is so easy to by accident move one point from 0 to some other value, and you cant be sure if you get it back at exact 0, only guessing and hoping by dragging the point back and watch the image, hoping that it wont set on a value that is 0,023. 

It would have been a much better design with just a liniar gradient. I can see the point in the circular gradient UI when using some of the more exotic gradients that flow through colors, but in most cases i dont see the point other than for looking more fancyful :-)

Does Adobe own the source code for these old effects now, or are they just licensed like the bundled CC effects?

- Robert 

2014/1/22 <brian@totaltraining.com>

I just used Colorama on a project to make a "sawtooth" gradient... super-simple with Colorama, complicated with any other AE tool.

 

Like Andrew, I use Colorama almost every day, but I might be biased.

 

Brian

 

------ Original Message ------

From: "Andrew Embury" <aembury@gmail.com>

To: "After Effects Mail List" <AE-List@media-motion.tv>

Sent: 1/22/2014 5:16:47 PM

Subject: Re: [AE] Colorama

 

Hey Jim,

Glad you asked! There are several uses that I use Colorama for that I don't think I could ever go without.

Things I use Colorama for:

- Make a matte from footage

-  A range selection tool

- Animated colour cycles

- Changing the colour of a gradient quickly and efficiently / removing the gradients interpolation (no stepping)

- Colour grading

- Adding colour values to different parts of the image based on (luminance, alpha, hue, etc.)

Take care!

- Andrew

On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 4:01 PM, Jim Curtis <jpcurtis@me.com> wrote:

On Jan 21, 2014, at 6:25 PM, Andrew Embury <aembury@gmail.com> wrote:

> You see, I use Colorama on a near daily basis

I'm curious about this.  I rarely use Colorama, and it looks like it does a lot of things, but I haven't taken the time to explore it much.

What does it do that you find so useful as to use it "on a near daily basis?"



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