Soft proofing is one of the best ways to emulate what your photo or art will look like before you take the time and spend the money to make it into a print. This video I posted below shows you how to use Adobe Photoshop’s soft proofing tool to setup and get accurate colors for your prints. Soft proofing is the practice of loading your image in a program like Photoshop, selecting the correct color profile then reviewing the picture to make sure the colors are shown on your monitor how you want them to look like. One thing I want to point out before you continue, we originally posted this info at FinerWorks.com for our customers but the principals apply to printing at home as well as through other printing services.
To start you will want to know what profiles refer to when it comes to color. Color profiles are the ICC or ICM files located on your computer which tell various software programs how to display colors on your screen. In other words they defined the range of colors available to an image being displayed. Some of the most common profiles are sRGB, AdobeRGB, Color RGB. These files will end in either “.icc” or “.icm”
While the profiles can help to display an image to its best ability on your computer screen they may not always accurately display how an picture will look when printed. For that purpose we have custom ICC and ICM profiles which printer manufacturers and those in the digital printing industry will create to better match what will be printed. These look at 3 elements: model of printer, types of inks and the substrate (paper or canvas type) on which you will be printing. For instance, you might print a photo on a specific glossy photo paper type but need to use a different color profile than that used on a matte fine art paper even if they are printed with the same printer and ink set. This may sound a little confusion but that is okay. The important thing to remember is for best results you want to find the color profile specific to those 3 elements.
Where do I find the color profile I need?
If you are printing through a printing service, any reputable printing company should have the color profiles you need and can be downloaded on their website. At FinerWorks you can download the color profiles here. If you are doing your own printing at home, you can usually find the profiles you need on the printer manufacturer’s web site unless you are printing on a paper or canvas not provided by the same manufacturer. In that case sometimes you can find the color profiles you need on the paper or canvas manufacturers web site if you are using a printer that is widely used. Unfortunately in many cases the color profiles you need are not available on off brand media types therefore you will need to either create your own custom color profiles or have someone create them for you.
How to Load Color Profiles
Most of the time when you install your printer on your computer the color profiles that come with the printer are installed automatically. If they are not or you are downloading your color profiles from a website you can easily place the file in the appropriate directory by either clicking and dragging the file there or downloading it to the proper folder directly. Below are some common paths used based upon the operating system your computer uses.
Mac OS X: /Library/ColorSync/Profiles or /Users/YourUserName/Library/ColorSync/Profiles
Mac OS 9.x: System Folder:ColorSync Profiles
Windows XP/Vista: \Windows\system32\spool\drivers\color
Assuming you have access to the color profiles you need and have saved them to the appropriate location the next thing is to use them as part of your image preparation or printing workflow.
Soft Proofing in Photoshop Video Demo
