Soft Proof in Photoshop

[martcol]

So, I read the tutorials and kind of worked out soft Proofing but it doesn't work out for me like they say!

I understand softproof as viewing your image in PS with your printer profile. I have a callibrated monitor and printer. When I viewed the image with the printer profile, like it says, I get a muddy kind of image. But I thought heck, I'm not fiddling with that! The advice was that you can add a layer mask in the softproof view and that will compensate for the muddy print which, results from PS prentending that its on paper not on your monitor.

Anyway, so I printed without using softproof and it wasn't bad. So, am I misunderstanding soft proofing or what?

Regards

Martin

[steven]

What are you using as you basis for the soft proof?

When I do soft proofing I don't get a muddy view of any kind, but when I do soft proofing I do specify a specific printer + specific paper that gives PS the color space to be used.

[Flagpole]

G'day Martin!

There are some excellent resources on the web that should answer your question. Check the sticky thread on the top of this forum "Canon ICC Profile guide". I am by no means an expert with only a minor knowledge of profiles in PS. I just did a print to hang in my room on i950 and experienced the some of your fraustration.

First of all "Soft Proofing" is designed to give you perceptual represantation of how your print will look on paper for a particular printer/paper combination. You don't mention what printer you have and which profiles you are using. But my advice is to download a test image like this one here http://www.gballard.net/psd/srgbforwww.html or here http://www.colourmanagement.net/downloads.html instead of using your own. Then look at it with Soft Proof option in PS. Take note of any color shifts in View>Proof Setup>Custom menu. Use 'Preview' to look at color shifts and take note which produces best rendering for various 'Intent'. You may find that certain settings will "blow out" highlights and render skin colors towards cool/warm but may improve how the sky is rendered in your landscapes.

This is the image I printed out to hang in my room on my i950.
http://members.oztralia.com/~bfeldman/Favorites/crw_2812l%20copy_std.jpg
When I did my print I've found that colors would be significantly different between various intent ranging from light green for the leaves to brown depending on your option and best rendering is not necessarily achieved by 'default' profile.
You don't need to SoftProof before printing your prints out. On Canon Printers I think when you print the file it will be automaticly converted to sRGB then the printer will apply an internal profile associated with each paper type listed in its options. However Soft Proffing takes a little of guessing out of how the print will look after printed on paper.

But it doesn't at the end replace the good old eyeball MkI in judging your prints and color reproduction. I ended up printing 4 copies before settling on the color :cool:

Hope it explained some of those things.

Flagpole
Sydney, Australia

[mbze430]

When you soft proof, it depends on which option you chose. If you use emulate paper-white, you on screen image will look dull and muddy. Because PS is trying to emulate the dulling white from paper. Of course our eyes see the persception differently.

My workflow for printing is as follows. Once I have the image looking good on the screen, I save a copy. Once I have a copy, I than start to soft proof it with my printer profile, weither it be my home printer or the Noritsu 3xxx at the photo-lab. Most of the time, you only require to adjust the curve to bring the image to look like your original. NOTE: You apply the curve while in Soft-Proof mode (CTRL-Y in PS).

Once I get all the prints to what they should look like at the printers, I save a copy to my "For Prints" folder. Depending where I am sending it to print.

For the Noritsu, they don't understand tagged images, so I convert them to my Noritsu profile (Glossy or Matte), resize, and crop. And send them off to my photo-lab.

For my in-home, I just save a new copy of the newly edited images, and use Qimage to print them.

As for how close you get from your soft-proof image to your printed image is how much slaving you done on your ICC profiles.

One thing to note. Depending how well you tweaked your ICC Profiles, you should get close to 92-95% accuracy against your SOFT PROOF.

The whole point of being color managed, is so you don't have to print 3-10 prints to get what you thought you saw on the screen. I do it once.

[martcol]

Thank you so much for taking the time to post. Soooo helpful.

Regards

Martin

[Spatch]

Mbze430,

Now I am a little confused. If you have a profiled monitor and a profiled printer then I thought that what you see on the monitor is what you get out the printer and it was not necessary to softproof. Are you saying that even with the monitor and printer profiled you still need to check on the softproof as this is the only way you will get an accurate representation of what will be printed??

Mark.

[mbze430]

Thank you for asking, because this is the "real" meat of a ICC color workflow.

As I have explained, when you profile your device, you are essentially recording your device how they response to color and the different shades of those colors. By no means they are corrected.

Alot of people think that when you profile your device, you are correcting it. This is not true. It wouldn't be call profiling than, would it? ;)

What an ICC enable application does is to put all these ICC Profiles together to give you a representation of what things will become, an on-screen representation.

Lets use PS as the example. PS uses your ICC profile for the monitor, and a known working colorspace (sRGB, Adobe RGB, ProPhoto...etc..), and display a representation of an image within this colorspace FOR YOUR MONITOR based on your monitor's profile.

Soft-proofing adds a new destination. If you soft proof for offset printing (CYMK), its a new destination beyond your monitor. If you soft proof for RGB printing, again its a new destination. You can even soft proof to different monitor, Windows and Mac standards.

Lets look at printers.

Every printer/ink/paper work in different color space, because the white of the paper is different from one type to another, ie glossy, luster, matte. This hold true to ink, and the printer itself. By profiling your printer/ink/paper, you create a profile of how each of these variation produces color. Remember you are not correcting, but rather you have created a file that tells ICC software how your printer produces colors.

To get a representation of what will be printed on paper via your screen. The ICC enable software must "manipulate" your screen+workspace(image)+printer/ink/paper profiles. This "manipulation" is call soft-proofing. Essentially the software uses the information from each of the device to give you a respresentation ON SCREEN.

Are you saying that even with the monitor and printer profiled you still need to check on the softproof as this is the only way you will get an accurate representation of what will be printed??


Yes, soft proofing displays what you will get from your printer via an on screen representation. How close will depend how well the ICC profile was made.

Why? Lets think of the concept. Why won't my current on-screen image look exactly what is printed with out soft-proofing....

Your on-screen image is based on your monitor profile, and a known workspace. If you don't involve your printer ICC profile on your display, how will you know what it will look like?

But if I "add" (soft-proof) my printer profile, now I get representation of what it might look like on my printer, because now the software is considering my monitor, my workspace, as well my printer's workspace.

[Spatch]

Thanks for the explanation. It makes sense totally. I am going to have to profile my monitor.