I must be missing something.....

Soft proofing. If the concept is to simulate on screen what you should expect when you print, how come people don't just enable "View Proof Colors" immediately upon entering Photoshop (assuming you intend to print)?

Rather, every time I read/research this topic, basically you spend all of your time adjusting the image to get it looking great on screen. Then you enable proofing and see how terrible it looks on screen, then readjust everything you adjusted before, then print and hope for the best.

My knowledge of this is fairly limited, but I have three possible theories:

1) I am completely mixing things up and scrambling different, unrelated things together into something that only exists in my twisted mind.

2) As backwards and frustrating as it is, this is simply how you do it (which there must be some important reason for).

3) Nobody actually uses soft proofing and I shouldn't either.

Take your pick, ladies and gents!

In this "day and age", presenting your photos is typically done first via either the Internet/Web or via email, so that pics are viewed typically on a "generic" monitor and browser. Then, when preparing to print, you want to "gear" the image with a printer/media/ink combination factored in, hence "Soft-Proofing"!

The problem is that the image will look different on every different variation of printer/paper/ink and that's just for printing using an ink jet. If your system is properly colour managed then you know that within those boundries what you see on screen will be consistent with others whose systems are also correctly calibrated. It is also not just the size of the avilable gamut that you have to consider for each output device, but also just exactly what the different RGB/CMYK values are going to look like when finally displayed. As no two different output destinations are the same at least soft proofing allows you to get close to seeing the differences and correcting for them

Alan

What if today you need to print on Super Shiny Glossy on your 3880 in order to give the model an 8x10 for her book and next week you will send the art director the file in Adobe RGB to view on his computer and if he likes it he will send it to his pre-press person for conversion to CMYK and then the week after you decide that you like the shot so much that you want a 30x45 to hang on the wall, so you send it to be printed on a Durst Lambda on Dull-But-Arty Matte? Do you start all over editing from the beginning each time?

tzalman wrote in post #16220404
What if today you need to print on Super Shiny Glossy on your 3880 in order to give the model an 8x10 for her book and next week you will send the art director the file in Adobe RGB to view on his computer and if he likes it he will send it to his pre-press person for conversion to CMYK and then the week after you decide that you like the shot so much that you want a 30x45 to hang on the wall, so you send it to be printed on a Durst Lambda on Dull-But-Arty Matte? Do you start all over editing from the beginning each time?

I don't know - do you?

RandMan wrote in post #16224369
I don't know - do you?

No. That's the point. Assuming you have a properly color managed workflow. . . you edit the base image till it looks good to you on your screen. Then, when it comes time to print, you load the print profile and then softproof the image to see what it will look like on that paper and adjust as necessary to make it look right. Not all papers/printers/inks are going to print/display the same, so some adjustments will need to be made.
Normally I will edit an image till it is where I want it and finalize it. Then when I need to print it I will send a copy back into Ps and edit it in softproof mode to make sure it will look right on the final printed medium. This usually doesn't require much work at all. A few quick tweaks and off it goes. I've found, for example; that one local printer tends to add a bit of magenta in skin tones, so I know to take some out first. I know that I'll need to adjust gamma/contrast before an "aluminum" print from MPix, where as another local lab tends to add contrast, so I have to reduce it a bit if i use them. Meanwhile, these adjustments, if done to the base sRGB image, would make it look awful on screen.

Some folks profile their display to match specific printer-paper combinations and then perform their editing under that display profile so that, in theory, the edits that are displayed on the monitor will match the printed output for that specific printer-paper output device. This would require measuring the white point of the paper under your viewing lighting (with your colorimeter device) and measuring the luminance level of the lighting reflected off of your paper under the viewing light. These would be the target values for your calibration, along with a black point or contrast ratio appropriate for your printer-paper combination. Then you tweak that to match the printed output on that printer-paper combination viewed under your viewing light, typically using a good reference print.

This display profile may not be good for viewing images on the web or working in a Word document, but it gives the user a good match as they edit in the fully color managed environment when the intent is to output to that specific printer-paper device.

No softproofing necessary.

kirk

Scatterbrained wrote in post #16224531
No. That's the point. Assuming you have a properly color managed workflow. . . you edit the base image till it looks good to you on your screen. Then, when it comes time to print, you load the print profile and then softproof the image to see what it will look like on that paper and adjust as necessary to make it look right. Not all papers/printers/inks are going to print/display the same, so some adjustments will need to be made.
Normally I will edit an image till it is where I want it and finalize it. Then when I need to print it I will send a copy back into Ps and edit it in softproof mode to make sure it will look right on the final printed medium. This usually doesn't require much work at all. A few quick tweaks and off it goes. I've found, for example; that one local printer tends to add a bit of magenta in skin tones, so I know to take some out first. I know that I'll need to adjust gamma/contrast before an "aluminum" print from MPix, where as another local lab tends to add contrast, so I have to reduce it a bit if i use them. Meanwhile, these adjustments, if done to the base sRGB image, would make it look awful on screen.

This makes a lot of sense.

kirkt wrote in post #16224555
Some folks profile their display to match specific printer-paper combinations and then perform their editing under that display profile so that, in theory, the edits that are displayed on the monitor will match the printed output for that specific printer-paper output device. This would require measuring the white point of the paper under your viewing lighting (with your colorimeter device) and measuring the luminance level of the lighting reflected off of your paper under the viewing light. These would be the target values for your calibration, along with a black point or contrast ratio appropriate for your printer-paper combination. Then you tweak that to match the printed output on that printer-paper combination viewed under your viewing light, typically using a good reference print.

This display profile may not be good for viewing images on the web or working in a Word document, but it gives the user a good match as they edit in the fully color managed environment when the intent is to output to that specific printer-paper device.

No softproofing necessary.

kirk

This makes a lot of sense.