Printing RAW in Lightroom

Question

No, this isn't a "can't get a decent print out of Lightroom" post and because of the amount of posts in this regard I haven't got 2 hours to spend searching for an answer to my question - if indeed an answer has already been posted. Please bear with me :-)
Question: In Lightroom it is possible to print directly from the RAW image yes? Now we all know that no printer accepts RAW data it has to be changed into a profile that the printer recognises. Could someone, in simple terms please, explain to me what this process is? To my simple way of thinking, I am editing a RAW image (using ProPhoto) on a calibrated monitor which doesn't show the ProPhoto gamut anyway and then printing to a printer that doesn't accept either RAW data or ProPhoto. So exactly what is happening along the way - is it at all reasonable to expect a print to perfectly represent what one sees on the monitor? If this sounds like a 'no brain' sort of question then I can confirm that I was indeed born without a brain but was more than compensated in other areas :-)

Answer 1

> is it at all reasonable to expect a print to perfectly represent what one sees on the monitor?
To back away from the previous discussion about the detail and restate something I believe to be true (from an earlier post in another thread):
There's no limit to the brightness of whites that a luminous object (ie a screen) can produce in theory, so you can keep turning it up and up and your pupils shrink to compensate; the result is that you see more and more shadow detail. The bugger is getting the blacks to actually stay black.
Similarly, there's no limit to the number of photons an illuminated object can swallow, reflecting none of them to give a dense black that's blacker than a black thing. The bugger is making it give back the light in the "white" areas, because some of them will always get eaten.
So the short answer for me is that until we start using reflected light to display something (which I'm a bit baffled by as a notion but can imagine that someone will try and invent it since it addresses all these difficulties) then a screen will never match a print becaue the above comments apply to every wavelength (colour) individually and so it's not just about light and dark but colour as well.
Having said that, I do believe with a modicum of effort that it's possible to get usefully close.
But (and it's a big but) although everyone talks about calibrating the monitor (which is very important), hardly anyone mentions having an illuminant that is matched to the monitor calibration - ie having 6500 Kelvin lights under which to view the prints. Expecting a 6500 Kelvin monitor to look the same as prints viewed under tungsten light is madness...but distressingly common.
It's also important not to have the monitor too bright, and so when people say "I don't need 6500 Kelvin lights, my monitor is right next to big bright windows and I check the prints in daylight" it often means they turn their monitor up to stellar brightness to compensate for the ambient light...
At that point, I usually exit the discussion. The truth is that all the information is out there. Don R recommends the Friedl blog (which is excellent). I like the "Real World Colour Management" book. I say either worry about it and learn from people who've thought it through very carefully, or don't worry about it and take what you're given.
There's not really any middle ground, unfortunately.
Damian