The Versions Palette allows you to display version-specific plates in versioning jobs. The palette lists the available versions in the job, together with their associated plate sets.

For example, suppose you have a job with three versions, containing a photograph that prints in CMYK. The three versions share the CMY plates, and each have their own K plate. For the photograph to print correctly in all versions, the photograph image on the K plate of each version must be aligned precisely with the common CMY plates. In some cases the shift is small, and is hard to notice when previewing the version on screen. However, it is very obvious in print.

To spot such shifts quickly and easily, you can keep one version - the master version - on a light table, and lay the next version on top of it. When looking at the layered composite, unwanted shifts become immediately obvious. A quick way to check whether there might be a problem, before comparing the individual versions, is to layer all versions on top of each other: Common images should still look OK. If you notice a shift, you can use the comparison technique to identify the problem version (or versions).

You control the viewing mode by clicking the viewing mode selector in the Versions palette or by selecting the corresponding menu item (View > Versions). You can also switch modes by using shortcuts (‘N’ for Normal mode, ‘A’ for All and ‘C’ for compare).