How Compare chooses and measures
Compare sets a second frame beside the one you are on and measures both. This page covers how that frame is chosen, what the percentage on each card is, and the sentence under the pair. Read it when the frame at the right is not the one you expected, or when you want to know how far to trust a figure.
Which frame is on the right
Compare takes the first of these that has an answer:
- A frame you have already taken from the candidate's session; the sharpest, if several.
- Any other frame from that session, the sharpest.
- A take from anywhere in the library.
- The first other frame in the library.
The first two are BEST IN THIS SESSION, the last two CLOSEST ELSEWHERE. The pass does not limit the choice: while you walk your holds, the frame at the right is often a take the pass does not hold.
Session here means the group Vixlo filed the frame under at import. It is not the session the Groups pane shows, which is cut again from capture times whenever you change the session gap, so the two need not match (How a shoot is grouped).
"Best" is a measurement, not a verdict on the photograph: sharpness, judged on the main face where Vixlo found one, together with how well that face was captured. So the frame at the right does not always show the higher percentage. Measuring runs in the background after a library opens, and a frame it has not reached ranks behind every frame it has.
The sharpness figure
The percentage beside the file name runs from 0 to 100: how sharp Vixlo measured the whole frame to be. It is green from 85, amber from 75 and red below, and absent on a frame not yet measured. It is the confidence on the focus check label (Zoom and the focus check). It reads focus only: Vixlo 0.1 does not flag closed eyes in your own photographs. The one Closed eyes in one frame line, on a ceremony frame in Earlier library · event, is written into that sample and was not measured (Known limits).
The line under the pair
Measured from the frames · no decision is changed automatically is always there. When both frames are measured and the gap between them is large enough to stand behind, a sentence above it names the sharper, the candidate's figure first: DSCF7602.JPG measures sharper focus than DSCF7601.JPG (71% vs 88%). Frames that measure exactly alike read DSCF7601.JPG and DSCF7602.JPG measure the same focus (82%). If either is unmeasured, or the two are too close to call, there is no sentence rather than a guess. Where both have a measured face, focus reads subject focus and the figures are the faces', which can differ from the percentages on the cards.
On a proposed pair, the pair's own line and its three keys replace this one; see A proposed pair in Compare.