PageProof Academy: Master PageProof's Adobe Creative Cloud Add-On

Hello everybody. So it's Marcus from PageProof here for the PageProof Academy on the Adobe add-on. So you can see from the little intro title here, we are going to go through how PageProof and the Adobe Creative Cloud tools integrate together to bring an experience for you as designers. So we're going to focus today, not so much on PageProof, the, the proofing tool. We're going to focus more on the Adobe Creative Cloud applications and what you can do with those. Now joining me in this webinar is JJ, and a little shout out, happy birthday, JJ. Okay, so let's get into it. As I said, we're going to spend most of our time inside of the Creative Cloud applications. So let's jump over now to InDesign. And have a look at the page proof tools. As you can see on screen over on the right-hand side, I have docked into my toolset here a page proof panel. Now, where did this page proof panel come from? That's probably, probably quite an important question. And that's the beginning. So let's reverse a little bit. Let's back it up a little bit and take a look at how do you get the PageProof panel installed? Well, that's done from the Creative Cloud applications. So you just go to your Creative Cloud app on Mac or PC, and you go to Stock and Marketplace over on the left-hand side here, click on Plugins, and then go up to the top and go PageProof, and you'll see PageProof come up. So this is the PageProof application. There would be a button here typically to install it. Press install, that will then install it into your Adobe applications. Now, it will put it into 6 applications. So you can see the little icons along here. We've got After Effects, Illustrator, InDesign, InCopy, Premiere Pro, and Photoshop. So it puts it in all of those Adobe applications. And we'll look at a couple of those during today's session. So We've now installed it on your Mac. You need to restart the application, go to extensions, and then you can see it. If you're on Windows, you need to start your Adobe applications as administrator just once. So you go to your Start menu, come to your Adobe application, right-click on it and say run as administrator just once. And that will then authorize the page proof plugin to run in your Windows application. So just a little tip there. So now here we are, we're inside of InDesign and you can see the panel showing up. Now this panel works the same way across all the applications. There are some slight variations for the video tools, but let's do a little bit of an orientation about what we're seeing. So panel shows up, you'll see it's split into two. Left-hand side of the panel is essentially a replica of your PageProof dashboard from the web browser version of PageProof. And there's a filter at the top of the screen. And this filter means that you can sort of weed out the noise and just get to the things that you care about. And in this case, I have a proof named Academy. Now, one thing I will note, this does not auto-refresh. So at the bottom of this panel, you'll see there's a refresh button. So we do recommend every now and then just tapping that refresh icon. If there's a proof there that you don't see, just hit that refresh, and it'll reload all of that information for you. So here you'll see the inbox, sent box, and outbox. So, and again, you'll see I've got a filter here just to keep it, keep it short. Now at the bottom of this, you'll notice that we've got some icons here for taking action. So this first one here, if you have a proof highlighted, If you click on this, go to proof, it'll actually open the browser and take you straight to that proof, which is really useful. And we will use that actually very, very soon. This button here is create new proof. So that will pop up a dialog box where you can then fill in the details and send out a proof. This is information about a proof. So if you've got a proof highlighted inside here, just click this info and it'll pop up a little info box. And of course the refresh, which we mentioned a little bit earlier on. Now over on the right-hand side, you'll see this is where your comments are going to show up. So your to-dos are all going to show up inside of here. And we'll, we'll look at that very, very soon. And then one little important thing, this little flyout menu at the top, you'll notice there's some options in here. So you can go to your different parts and create a new proof, et cetera. But one thing I will point out is It shows you who you're logged in as. So you can make sure that you're logged in with the right account. If you don't see some of the proofs in there that you are expecting, it may be that you're logged in as another PageProof account. So you can check it here. And the PageProof version, this is the version of the plugin. So we can, we can make sure sometimes if you want to know what the latest version is, you can look inside of there. But we do recommend keep keep the plugin up to date. We are releasing features and updates for this plugin very regularly. And early next year, we're going to have a new plugin architecture for this panel, which means we're going to bring a whole host of really cool features which you haven't seen before will show up inside of here as well. Okay, let's get to it. So what we're going to do now is we're going to use this panel for creating a proof. So you're sitting inside of any of your applications. And when you click on the Create New Proof button at the bottom here, it pops up and says, hey, here are the details for creating the proof. So proof name, it just inherits from the file name. And then below that, you'll have some application-specific options showing up. So in the case of InDesign, this is showing up essentially some options for pages and whether you want spreads on or not. And a tip about spreads, by the way, if you are wanting your proofs to be in spreads, create the proof with the spreads option checked on. That's so when the comments come back, they will map to the right pages if you sent the proof from here with spreads checked on. So that is a tip. That we think is very, very important if you're wanting to work in spreads. Make sure you've checked on spreads so that PageProof knows when the comments come back to put the comments on the right pages. So a little tip there. Now you'll see here for InDesign, we've got the PDF preset. The reason for that, PageProof creates a PDF for you automatically out of InDesign. You don't need to do it. You don't have to worry about exporting PDFs and doing any of the, of the work. We're going to do that as part of uploading this into PageProof. And one thing we do recommend highly is using the PDF/X-3 option for the preset. You can switch it to anything else that you like, but we highly recommend PDF/X-3. The reason why is because it does the best job of transparency, overprint, and all of that rendering for making sure the proof looks exactly like you want it to. If you are doing a PDF that has buttons in it or links that you want people to be able to check inside of page proof, make sure this is on interactive PDF, and then that will give that ability for your reviewers. So let's go back to our PDF/X3. Now below that, switch on crop marks. You can also set the bleed and things inside of here as well if you want to. So just some options in here. Now if we switch over to some different applications, for example, if we're inside of Illustrator and you go send out proof, the options are different. So you'll see here that, you know, if you're going out as an AI file, it's going up as an AI file by default. So that's going to upload an AI file into PageProof. Bear in mind that if your reviewers hit the download button in PageProof, they're going to get an AI file. And that may not be what you want. And if that's the case, just switch it to PDF. And now what's going to happen is that it's going to make a PDF and put that into PageProof. And of course, now you've got options for page ranges and things like that. So a couple of little tips on formats inside of different applications. And in Photoshop, you get the option of JPEGs and things as well. So some different bits. If you are working in video, so here we are inside Premiere Pro, when you create a proof from inside here, you've got the option to do the sequence or just the in-to-out in your video sequence. So again, some different options depending on the application that you are using. All right, so let's go back into InDesign. Now let's send this proof out. So if I click on OK, That is going to create the file for us for proofing. It's going to put it up into page proof and take us automatically to the proof setup screen. So you'll see this proof setup screen should be familiar to all of you. And you'll notice a couple of things are slightly different here. When you upload it from inside of the Adobe applications, we give you the option to put it into a collection. So you can pop the proof into a collection here. And go through and set up the proof and create the proof and send it out. So again, we're not going to go through this now because this is standard page proof stuff. So we'll just go back. Now, inside of InDesign, I think I wanted to show you how you can go and take a look at some of those different— like if you're highlighting a proof inside of here and you want to go and take a look at it inside of page proof, just highlight the proof name, and then the link down the bottom here, this one says 'Go to proof.' If you click on that, it will open up PageProof to that proof. And this one here is actually a proof where to-dos are requested. So this will be that area where you've either been set up as an editor, or you're the owner of the proof and you've been sent a to-do list. So you'll— this will be again familiar to a lot of you. And you can see there's a whole lot of markup here that's been placed by people. So we've got, you know, different types of markup on this proof. And I want to make these changes to my InDesign file. So let's jump back into InDesign and see how we can do that using that Adobe plugin. I've highlighted the proof inside of here. The reason I know it's in that status, if you hover over this little green sliver here, it tells me that it's in the state of to-dos requested. So Great. I know it's in the right, right place. And I can see there are 4 comments here that people want us to do. Now, the structure of these comments, these are comments that are showing exactly as they were inside of PageProof. And if you click onto the comment, you'll notice that it brings the markup exactly as we saw it in PageProof and puts it on top of the artwork, which is absolutely brilliant. You don't need to have two screens, one with the changes, one with InDesign, you can actually see it overlaid. And we're not just giving you like a web view to the changes, which is not really sufficient. This is putting it on top of the artwork. So, you know, ah, that's the change I need to make. So you can go through and make that design change. And you'll notice there's a checkbox here that says Done. So once you've made the design change, check it off as done, and it comes off the list. Now, where did that just go? Oh, that, that was done by mistake. If that does happen, down the bottom of this panel, this menu here, you can go back and say all comments, and they all come back, and you can uncheck that one that you did accidentally. But by default, it puts it onto to-dos so that those, uh, kind of get removed automatically as you check them off as done. Now, the next one says here, replace. And you'll notice there's an icon over on the right-hand side. This is an attachment. So if the comment has an attachment in it, rather than you going to PageProof again, we're, we're keeping you inside of your design tool. You can click that icon. It will download the attachment that was placed in the comment, and you can now place it into the artwork. So we can do that. Check that off as done. Now there's two that you can see here, these two highlight text. So the changes that are text-based, you'll see when I highlight the comment, it highlights the copy up inside of my document up here. So what I can do at this point, rather than copy and paste, if the text inside the comment is the correct text that I want up inside my InDesign document, All you do is triple-click the copy up inside of your InDesign document or make a selection of the bit you want. And then down here, you'll see there's a button that says Replace Text. All you do is go Replace Text, boom, makes the text change for you. So really, really easy to get those changes into your document without you having to retype any of those changes. There are some improvements coming to this. It'll be an auto-select and replace coming very, very soon. But this is definitely a big improvement over doing it all manually. And this one here, again, if I triple-click inside of here, I can just say, hey, replace it. Just click on replace and boom, it just makes the text change for me. And I didn't need to go through and make that change. So I'm going to check that all off as done. My to-do list is now completed. And I have got one here that was prepared earlier, of course. So here we can see, here is my document. That is all correct. Now, one thing I will point out, right at the moment, it's popped up over on the right-hand side of the panel. It's popped up a little warning here. And if I hover over that warning, it says this document did not create the version that matches the proof. So we let you as designers manage your files yourself. But if you select a proof and select a document which are not— the proof was not made from the document, will pop up this little warning for you. You can carry on as normal. Don't worry, that's just a warning. It's not stopping you from doing what you want to do. But it is a nice way of saying, hey, just realize that this document is not the proof document. And in my case, I'm going to say that's fine. So I'm going to upload a new version here. So beside the name of the proof, there is an Upload New Version button. And what this is going to do is it's going to stack a new version on top of the previous version because I made all the changes. So I just simply go Upload New Version, pops up my dialog box. Everything looks good here. And that's now going to make a proof from this file, pops it up into page proof. And from here, everything looks okay. I can go through and check the workflow and make sure the deadline's okay. And if I want to, I can apply a different checklist. If I wanted to add a checklist on here, I can, I can do that. So you can go through and it's just the page proof setup screen, which is really, really easy and convenient. Everything looks okay here. So I just simply say upload new version and that pops a new version up inside of page proof, sends the proof out, and everybody's happy. Now what that does, if I click on Go to Proof, what that's done is it's made us a new version. So the version dialog down the bottom here, if I click, it shows version 1 and version 2. So I can see the previous version of this piece of work. And the great thing with this is that you can go back and look at version 1. And what you'll notice in here is that all of the markup is green. So if you look at it, it's all green instead of red. And the reason for that is as you're checking them off inside of the Adobe add-on inside of your design application, it's live updating PageProof. So you can see, oh, those are all done. That's great. Now your reviewers can go into compare mode so they can click on compare mode. And that now puts left-hand side, it's got the original version. And then on the right-hand side, we've got the new version that we just uploaded. So they can go through and check the changes, or they can hit the smart compare button, will overlay the changes, and we can pulse where the differences are. So your reviewers can now go through and just make sure the changes that they asked for were actually carried out in the design. So just some of the things that you can do inside of there. OK, let's have a look at a couple of different things inside of here. So I'm just going to switch back and we're going to take a look at all the markup, for example. And if you highlight that now, if you're in the situation where you've got all the markup on screen, you just want the markup to go away. You just want a clean, clean slate. Over in the very bottom corner, right-hand side of this, you just simply click and it will hide all of the markup. So it just switches off the markup on your proof. So you have got that ability there if you need it. And that's very, very helpful if you want to look at a clean slate of where your design is without any of the markup on it. Alright, now, couple of tips. If you're working in long documents, and I'm talking, you know, multiple pages, lots of text, and you've got comments which are inside of here, and the comments are going to affect the text layout, What we recommend is you work from the back page forward. And the reason for doing that is because now the text is not going to be moving and changing positions and all that sort of thing. So you're very simply at that point, scroll to the bottom of the panel, and just work up for your text changes inside long documents. So that's definitely a recommendation that you can get a good— gives a good experience for that. And that same thing applies if you're working inside of video. So if we go back over here, and we take a look at Premiere Pro, so here we are inside of Adobe Premiere Pro. And we've got the page proof panel inside of here. And we can highlight these comments. And what that does is it shows us, it jumps us to the timeline and then shows us the comment inside on the sequence timeline here, which is, which is really, really cool. But what we recommend for changes here is again, work from this side back so that if you do edit the video because of a change, it's not now knocking out the rest of the time. So you can, I think, for that work this way. If you look at and you see that, oh, these comments are wanting me to cut sections of video out or add sections of video in, then you're best to work from from right to left for your changes. So just a little tip for working with your different, different content there. So those are the applications. As I said, probably worth looking at what you can also do inside of Illustrator because Illustrator is an amazing application. I love working with Illustrator. The same thing that we just looked at works in the same way. And this also does the same thing in Photoshop. But again, if you highlight the proof inside of Illustrator, again, if you highlight the comment, it's going to show you the markup on your illustrations. Same thing with Photoshop. If you've got a whole lot of retouching requests as comments, and you click on them, it's going to highlight the areas inside of Photoshop as well. So super useful use of the Adobe plugin to make the most of your workflows inside of your design applications. So just to recap this, the Adobe plugin available for all of your Adobe Creative applications being InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, then the video applications Premiere Pro and After Effects. And also InCopy as well, all supported. You install it directly from the Adobe Store. So you can go through and do that. Okay. So with that, that brings us to the conclusion of the webinar. And just remember, there is a brand new architecture coming next year for the plugin. It'll be a simple update. And will bring a whole host of really, really powerful features above and beyond what you've seen today to the Adobe integration. So we look forward to bringing that to you very, very soon. Thank you very much, everybody, and have a great rest of your day.