PageProof Academy: Compare mode masterclass, version comparison & proofing tips

Hello everybody, it's Marcus from PageProof here to go through a PageProof Academy today on the Compare Mode in PageProof. So thank you for taking the time to come in and learn about the Compare Mode and all the various different options that Compare Mode brings. So let's get started straight away. So let me just give you a little bit of background on Compare Mode. So back in the day, compare— how do we do compare? Well, we used to get things like, you know, a PDF and we'd open up two windows. We get a PDF from the client and a PDF that we've been working on. We'd open those up and we'd do a visual compare. Now that harks back to the days when we actually used to get physical proofs, put those down on the light table and actually check those as well. So if anyone's got any memories of those, I hear you. I remember the days when we used to print out a laser and get a piece of film, put it on a light table, and then we'd do this quick flicking motion to actually check to see if a piece of text had moved or had been inserted into the proof. So, there's lots and lots of ways that we used to do compare, but these days we can do it on a computer, which is a little bit more user-friendly. But let's take a look at some of the options inside of PageProof for compare. Okay, so we're going to go over multiple different media types. And I'm going to start off with static proofs because we spend a bit of time in static proofs, a lot of us. And those will be things like social posts. It'll be Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, maybe, of course, PDFs. But then it also extends to things like photography and going through to other formats as well. That we might be using, just visuals and things like that. So static media, I've got a little collection here which has got a press ad in it. So we're gonna just go into this particular proof. So open this proof up and we can see the various aspects on the screen. And if we look down the bottom corner, we'll see there's a version popup here. And the version popup shows us that we've got version 1 and version 2. So we've got 2 versions of this proof. And because of that, we get the compare icon, which is the one right next to it, which is this compare, which you can click on and it will actually open up the compare mode. So let's go in and take a look at compare mode. Click onto compare mode. That then opens up this split or this interface showing us two versions. So over here I've got version 2, over here I've got version 1, and you'll notice that version 1 has got markup on top of it. That markup on version 1 is green. It's all green because the designer has gone through and said, I've done this, I've done this, I've done this. That's the reason why you've got that green markup. And if you hover over it here, it's going to tell you the markup comment that's available. And of course, you've got the comments pane here, which you can pop out and click through the comments and see those if you want to as well. So this is a method that simulates having two printouts on your desk and actually looking at, you know, what we designed and then look at what we were asked to do. So you've got this now side-by-side mode, which you can go through and check the changes. Now, of course, over on the left-hand side, we've got a bunch of different tools here. You can still comment on proofs inside of here. So if you see something on the new version that you want to comment on, you've got the comment tools here that you can use. Zoom, obviously, for zooming into different detail if you want to. Magic tools are here as well. Then we have this link icon. Now, this link icon here, and you can see it's green. This is because we've linked these two together, which means if I turn the page on one of them, it's going to turn the page on the other. So the pages are actually linked or locked together. If you want to turn a page independently of another page, you'll need to unlink it first., and then you can navigate the pages on one of the proofs and the other one will stay put. This is sometimes useful where the new version might have less pages or it might have more pages, and you want to then be able to compare the same page. However, on the new version, it's page 4, and on the old version it was page 3. So that's when you would unlink and then you'd be able to align them. And then this icon here, switch position. If you click on switch position, it actually will then switch these two over because you might want version 1 over on the left. So you click on this icon and you're able to switch the position here, but it also shows us the proof name inside of here as well. So you've got a little bit of information if you want to click onto that, it'll show you, and you can use that switch position to actually just move them. Now we are going to change this icon and a little bit of functionality with switch coming up in a future release, but I won't talk too much about that. Okay, so that is our side-by-side compare mode and really great, really useful. Now, of course, if the proofs are the same physical dimension, then you could get the icon at the bottom here that says smart compare. In smart compare, when you click it, it overlays the two and then shows us the differences between the two versions. Now, right at the moment, they must be exactly the same size, but in a future release of PageProof Smart Compare, you will be able to smart compare different page sizes. And the reason for that typically is going back to the, the days of printing. Of course, you know, we wanted to be able to, if we wanted to actually look at a, a printout over the top of a piece of artwork which had crop marks on it, you could do that physically. Easy. Just line it up with the crop marks. Look at it. Okay. That seems to be the same. This is what we're going to enable inside of PageProof is the ability for you to actually have a piece of artwork with a new version that might have crop marks and color bars. And you'll be able to do a smart compare and it'll allow you to do various different alignments to get it so you can check the two. But so Smart Compare overlays, and in my case, it's starting to show me it's flashing, hey, these are the differences. So what it's doing is it's switching between version 1 and version 2 and showing us the differences between them. So that's pretty, pretty useful. Over on the very right-hand side, you'll see there's a cog icon here, and it's got advanced settings. So with advanced settings, if you pop that up, you'll notice you've got some different options here that you can set for how Smart Compare looks to you. So for example, if you prefer red, if you click on the red color icon here, you'll get your difference showing up in red. So you can choose different colors if you want to, depending on the artwork that you're working on and whether it has a different color that conflicts. You can also, this last one here, by the way, you can choose your own color if you want to, and that'll now use your color for the smart compare between the differences there. So this one that's white actually is interesting because it gives you like a high contrast mode, and then it moves us down to the next piece, which is the opacity. So you can increase the opacity of this, and it really, in this particular white mode, which I use, just gives us that high contrast. You can adjust the opacity and then it gives you a really big difference on the way things are looking. So you've got that option down here as well. So you can use that if you need to, to go through and check the changes using this. Now the strobe, you can increase the speed of it. So you can make the strobe much faster or you can just have no strobe and it's just going to show you flat. Here are the differences between the two. So you've got options for that. And then jiggle. Well, you know, it's a fun thing. Jiggle just really, really wants to make sure that you really see where the differences are. So for me, I have jiggle set to none. So just a little option there. Okay, so those are the options for the Smart Compare. You can also do things like you'll see this next one across, hide the differences. That's just gonna take us back and sort of right back to the original artwork. And you can switch that on, switch that off. So if you wanna jump back and, just have a look at the original. Okay, now show us the differences. Great. That's this. So that's what this icon does. And then this little percentage here is showing you estimated. This is the difference between the two. What percentage of the artwork has changed? Okay, so another couple of options that are here. You'll notice that we've got in the center, we've got a comparison slider and a quick flick mode. So let's have a look at the quick flick mode first. Okay, so click on the quick flick. What this lets you do is if you click it, it just toggles between the two versions. So you can just toggle quickly and see the differences. You can also, by the way, use your arrow keys on the keyboard. So if you want to use the arrow keys to switch between the two, you can do that as well. So the quick flick is a great way. And, you know, this is a way we used to do it on the light bench. With the physical artwork, we'd actually flick between the versions by getting the light bench to show through and actually see the differences showing up. So it's a good way of doing it. Next one across here is the comparison slider. So if you click onto the comparison slider, it gives you the slide tool. And in the center here, you can just drag this across and see the differences between the two versions. Okay, so really is revealing one version over the top of the other. So you can, you can do that and you can see where the differences are. So you're looking at the things that people asked for and where they actually were done. So I'll also pop out the comment pane. If you actually come into the comment pane here and you click onto the comment, you'll see that it goes through and highlights this for you, which is extremely useful. Very similar, you can flick the slider over here, by the way, and then you can click into each one of these and it'll show you where those differences are as well. Quite useful for checking changes by looking at your comment pane, which you can pop out at any time and then see those differences coming up. So that is the slider mode that you can use in the compare as well. Now, down the bottom here, you can change the color of the slider. So by default, it's this gray color. You can again choose the color that you want if you want to. Okay, so we'll jump out of slider mode just by clicking on that icon. And we'll see some other options along the bottom here, including page navigation. And you can go into the page grid if you want to. And then you can say which of these you want to see. So you can show both of these side by side. So you can go back to that, or you can go back to showing the differences in the compare mode. So lots of options down the bottom here for navigating around the different ways that you want to see things. Okay, so let's have a look at the Smart Compare features, and this one I'm going to focus on is the Smart Check. So when you are in the Smart Compare mode, you'll see that Smart Check shows up here, and the Smart Check, if you see it, click onto it, it's going to show you a lot of technical information about the file you're looking at, and it's going to show you where there are differences. So this is super powerful for those where, hey, I want to actually see, are we looking at the Are we looking at the same fonts? Are we looking at like what's different between version 1 and version 2? So SmartCheck, new feature, super cool. It's now showing me, hey, here's some things you need to look at. So you just look down the right-hand side here and I can see what's changed. Okay, the file name's changed. So version 1 had this name, version 2 had this. File size has changed as well. So I can see, right? There is a difference between the file size. Now, where it says no change, obviously it's the same. So that's useful. And this one here changed. Ah, version 2 doesn't have a color profile. So version 1 did have a color profile. Version 2 has no color profile. So this is how you can use the smart check to go into the things which you can't see with your eyes in terms of looking at a proof, Now we're looking at some technical information which is buried beneath the file, and you can really see these surface up. So if we had a difference in fonts or a difference in color, then you'd be able to see those showing up in the SmartCheck. So just a reminder to get SmartCheck, be in the Compare mode, hover over here, and you will see SmartCheck, this little icon over on the left. Click, and that'll give you your SmartCheck panel to go through and make sure the technical information is the way you expect it. Okay, so those are the options in the static compare. Lots of options for people to use to actually make sure the things are the changes that you asked for actually carried out. So some really good, good options there. Okay, so let's jump out of here. And what we're going to do now is have a look at video proofing. So if I go in, we open up a video proof. There are some basic options for compare inside of here. So the same interface shows up again. You can see we've got a version pop-up here for this video, and you'll see there is a compare icon here as well. So with video, when you click on the compare icon, it takes you to a screen that puts the two videos side by side, and you'll see again, version 1 has got the markup on the timeline here. So you can see that markup. And again, the comments are available in the comment pane if you want to pop it out and look at those. But the great thing with this is you can just hit the play icon at the bottom of the screen and that will play the two videos simultaneously and you can see the changes and you can even see where that markup shows up as well. So you can see that markup showing up on the right-hand side. Boom, there it is. And you can go through and just check the changes between the two. So that is the smart compare or the compare feature inside of your video. And we are looking at a smart compare feature for video compare in the near future for page proof as well. Okay. The next one we're going to take a look at is web proofing. So website proofing, let's jump in and take a look at that. So compare as you would see it with static or video is a bit different with website proofing. And the reason why is website proofing is live. So this is apple.com, the Apple website. Apple can change this as much as they like at any time. They don't need to ask me, hey, would you like me to apply those changes? They just change it. It's just the way, the way that works. So what we do when you place a comment inside a PageProof, so if I pop out this comment pane, is what we do is we take a snapshot at the time that the comment is placed. And that snapshot is embedded in the comments. So we know what the website looked like at the time that the comment was placed. So if I click onto this comment, it's going to bring back and show me exactly what the website looked like when that comment was placed. That's super useful. Now, if you click on the little three dots here and roll this down, you'll see that we get this technical information about the, about the comment. And you'll notice there are two icons here. We've got Snapshot represented by a camera icon, and then we've got Restore the Webpage View. So when you go Restore the Webpage View, that brings back exactly the website where it was, takes you to the scroll position and everything of exactly where the website was when the comment was placed. But you'll see there's an animation playing here. So that's a super great one. There is exactly the point. So if I go back to my snapshot, That is where the person commented. Go to the live web view. You can watch the animation play and know exactly where it was by watching it, where the snapshot referred to. Okay, so that's how you do a comparison at a comment level. So for website proofing, you are doing your comparison at comment by comment by comment phase. So I click into different comments. We can see different things here. And again, just roll this, roll this down, clicking on the three dots. I can say, what did the live website look like at the time? Again, it's going to bring it back for us so we can see. And then you've got these snapshots. So if you click onto the snapshot, that's going to show us exactly what the comment looked like at the time it was placed by the person doing the review. So this, this can be useful also for those times when you are looking at even just a static page, a static webpage. So we just looked at a webpage that had some animations going on. This is a static webpage. So this webpage isn't gonna change too much. Again, if I go show me the live web view, that's what it looks like. Show me the snapshot, it's the same, but I can see my markup now asking whether this icon should be centered or whether we wanna move the Apple icon into the middle of this page. So again, I can go show me the live website. Show me the new one. Now, if the website designer did move the icon into the center of the screen here, then when we go to the live website view, we should see that change. Okay. Because the live website view is literally the live website view. So if they'd made that change, we would see that show up. And if we go to snapshot, we'd see the thing we asked for. So that is how you can do comment by comment comparison inside of a website proof. So what I've got here is masters, and masters are an interesting manner. It's a way in which you can actually create approved proofs that have gone through PageProof. And these are the masters. These are the ones which we're going to compare everything against. And you can use this workflow if you work in packaging, for example. So You might have signed off the artwork for your packaging, and then somebody in another part of the world is doing some modifications to your packaging for some localization for their market. So how do you know the differences that they've applied to what you have already signed off? And the way you can do that is using this concept here, which is setting up a master. So let me show you how that works. You can go in and as you can see, I've got my masters showing up in here. These are approved. They're in a collection inside my Press 2025, inside my Press Masters. If I go into this Press Campaigns, I can see this is a proof that is currently in progress. This is my work in progress. This may have been supplied by somebody. And now I want to compare this proof against one of those master proofs. So how do you do that? Because most people think compare works just between versions of the same proof. Well, that's not quite right. We actually have a feature here buried in the dashboard. You click on the little manage icon here. You can go compare. It then says, right, select two proofs. So I'm going to select this proof. Then I'm going to navigate to my masters. Right here. And it says I would like to compare this against this master. And now I have got my work in progress proof that I've chosen. And now I've navigated to my masters and I've chosen the master that I would like to compare it against. So this would be the one that's signed off. You can see it's approved. Click Compare and it puts the two up side by side. So now I can check Okay, we have got the work in progress proof against the master showing up on screen. Now I will show you a little advanced feature, something that a lot of people don't know, but is super useful. If you look at the top of the screen here, this is for the page proof nerds out there and geeks like myself. You'll notice that we've got a proof ID showing up here. So you've got a proof ID for the first one and a proof ID for the second one. You can actually paste in a different proof ID into here and it will compare any proof with any proof. So if you really want to get, get technical about it, you can use the selection feature. You can go through and say, yes, I'd like this proof against this proof. And that's a nice way of doing it. Or if you are one of those people that knows how to sort of grab proof IDs and put them up into the URL, you literally can come in here and compose your own URL using this and it will just show you exactly what it is that you want. This proof against this proof. So that's particularly useful in a lot of ways. If you're working with video proofs, you can have a video proof as one and you can have maybe the SRT file, which is the subtitles, as the other proof. And you can put those both up on screen and work through those. So there's lots of different ways in which you can use the Compare mode outside of just doing the compare between versions of the same proof. You can do it with different proofs, and that is enabled from the dashboard. So I thought I'd just show you a little trick on that. So that concludes the PageProof Academy on Compare. Hope you learned something there. There's a lot to take in, but Compare mode, extremely useful. There's some new features coming to it. But again, just to recap, doing Smart Compare and Compare on the static proofing, we are bringing a feature that enables you to use Smart Compare on different size pieces of artwork, particularly useful if you have something that has no crop marks and the same piece of artwork that has crop marks, you'll be able to now use the Smart Compare even though the canvas sizes are different. So that's a feature coming. Video proofing, we would have seen how to use the video proofing. And in the future, we're looking to bring a smart compare feature to that. And then website proofing, looking at the compare, which is not done at proof level because it's a live website, but you can do it at comment level. So you can go into each comment and go, show me the snapshot, show me the live site. So we can, we can do that. And then finally, the last thing there, which was comparing two completely different proofs. So that workflow I just showed you of the masters and then the ability to actually just grab a proof ID and a proof ID and just putting those into the compare screen, super useful as well. So thank you very much for your time today. And we will put out a new PageProof Academy in the next few weeks. So you can look to join that and learn more about PageProof. Thank you.