# Explain soft proofing and provide any workflow tips...



## CyDigital (Sep 10, 2015)

I am a recent Aperture convert and am having some workflow slow downs with my conversion to LR. Can someone explain soft proofing, as well as and other workflow tips with LR that might help speed me up.  I know it's a learning curve but it's just frustrating switching to new software and having to please clients and provide quality work at the same time.  It's almost like I reinvented my whole brand.  Help!


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## clee01l (Sep 10, 2015)

Displays are transmissive media, Paper prints are reflective media.  One transmits color while the other reflects it. The appearance of an image on a display will look very different from that same image printed on paper. 
Soft proofing is a way to mimic on the screen how an image will appear when printed with a certain printer and paper type.   If you are not going to print yourself, you can ignore soft proofing.  If you are going to use a 3rd part print shop and they specify a color profile to be used with their printer and paper, then you can soft proof to see on the screen approximately how the image will appear on your screen. 

You can only guarantee how the image will look on *your* monitor, because this is the only monitor that you have control over.  You will want to calibrate your display so that when you send a signal of a certain color, it will transmit that color from the appropriate pixels.  If you have a calibrated monitor and use soft proofing, then you will get a fair approximation of how the image will look when printed.  

If your monitor is calibrated then the image that you post on the web will represent the colors as you saw them.  Other viewers and other monitors may not be accurately calibrated. so their color rendition may be different.   But this part has nothing to do with soft proofing and a calibrated monitor is the first step in both soft proofing for the print and for viewing by others on the web.


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## Johan Elzenga (Aug 10, 2016)

felixdelmante said:


> Soft proofing is the ability to view a simulation of how your image will look when output to the printer on your monitor, based on the chosen profile. The workflow would go something like the following:
> 1. You open a file, and choose a profile.
> 2. After a profile and settings are chosen, you adjust the image to look best with that profile.
> 3. Then you would use the save as command to save a profiled version of the image and still have a copy of your original file.
> ...



You seem to forget that this a a Lightroom forum. In Lightroom, you do not 'Save as' an image. You can save a virtual copy however. That is what Lightroom offers to do when you soft proof the image.


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## LouieSherwin (Aug 11, 2016)

Hi and welcome,

Yes Lightroom can take a little getting used to. But once you under stand some of the basic especially what is and is not in the catalog and how Lightroom interacts with the Catalog and your image files on your hard drive then it becomes quite powerful. If you have not already looked at it, I highly recommend Victoria's FREE Lightroom eBook to give you a good understanding of Lightroom basics. 

Regarding soft proofing, it is most useful as part of fully color managed workflow for your print output. It is essential if you are using custom profiles for each your printer/paper/ink combinations. It is marginally useful in the case where the output is intended for the WEB because you have absolutely no control over the viewing environment. 

So letting Lightroom convert images to sRGB is pretty much best that you can hope for. The reason being that the software color conversion will pretty much always do a better job than you can do by trying to tweek the adjustments in Lightroom. This is true even if or perhaps especially if the softproof to sRGB is showing large areas of out of gamut colors. The reason for this is to involved for here but if you are interested to learn more watch color guru Andrew Rodney's (Digital Dog :: Main) tutorials on soft proofing. Although originally made using LR4 everything applies to LR6.

Video tutorial: Lightroom 4 and soft proofing video
Video tutorial: Lightroom 4 and soft proofing video part 2

-louie

PS I am assuming that you regularly profile your monitor with a quality measurement device. All color bets are off you you do not start from a profiled monitor. Software calibration will not cut the mustard.


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