Soft proofing for online printing - CS5

After using PSE since V1 and LR since it was beta I've added CS5 and I'm a bit overwhelmed.  Right now I'm trying to set up CS5 to soft proof for online printing.  I read a bunch of online tutorials including Dry Creek Photo's, then downloaded and installed the ICC files for my local Costco.  When I select one of the Costco printers under View - Proof Setup - Custom - Device to Simulate, I get an error message:  "Could not complete your request because the ICC profile is invalid."  I've repeated this with profiles from other Costcos - including one across the country from me - and from Adorama.  No joy.  I'm running CS5 V12.1 x64; it's the same story in 32 bit.  OS is Vista 64 Home Premium (fully updated).  Interestingly, I had no problem when I downloaded ICC profiles for a couple of paper-printer combinations; it's the online services that are giving me grief.  Any idea what I can try next?

Keep in mind that your monitor puts limits on how useful soft-proofing is. If you have a standard-gamut monitor, what you see on-screen is already soft-proofed to sRGB (more or less). If your target profile has a larger gamut, you won't see any difference on-screen.
If you want to do this in Lightroom, just soft-proof to sRGB and you'll probably be fine. The histogram will show you if there is substantial channel clipping, and you can adjust to that. However, since you have Photoshop, my choice would be to do it there, using the Blurb profile.
Printing conditions vary widely around the world and CMYK-profiles likewise. To give you an example, US Web Coated (SWOP) v2, which is the Photoshop default, has a gamut much smaller than sRGB. In Europe the corresponding standard is ISO Coated v2 300% (ECI), which has a gamut that practically corresponds to Adobe RGB. To soft-proof effectively for this you need a wide gamut monitor.
Where the Blurb profile places in this I don't know.

Similar Messages

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  • Can you soft proof for Blurb in Lightroom? Can't get Blurb icc to show up in list.

    I have added the Blurb_ICC_Profile.icc to Library/ColorSync/Profiles and Library/ColorSync/Profiles/Recommended, but when I turn on Soft Proof in Lightroom and try to select the Blurb_ICC_Profile.icc from the Profile dropdown in the Soft Proofing Workspace on the right, clicking on other to add it, it simply does not show up as an item in the list even though I have added it to the Profiles folder. 
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    Yes. I found another discussion on a blog that discussed the whole thing in detail. Has anyone found a profile that comes close that one could use in LR to soft proof for Blurb? Some said they used sRGB, but I compared and there is a huge disparity. Blurb color space is about 2/3 smaller than sRGB.

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    size is mort important than format. I prefer PSD files, but png, tiff, tga, even jpeg if you do not need transparency. Just make them big enough that at some point in your composition they are scaled to 100%. IOW, if you are drawing full frame animation cells for HD they do not need to be any bigger than 1920 X 1080 pixels. If you are going to scale them up or move in on some details then the area you are going to be pushing in on needs to be 1980 X 1920.

  • Allow Soft Proofing - allow selecting printer profile

    The claim to fame purports to make LightRoom a one-stop processing shop for Photographers.
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    >Here's the scoop. The reason for Lightroom is as a repsoitory for all your ORIGINAL ARCHIVE FILES...in a single place and single condition. The idea is that you DON'T need to keep track of all your "consumable file"-files that are made for a single consumption.
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  • Can I soft proof in LR4 like I can in PS CS5?

    I haven't used LR 4 yet, but did view the soft-proofing tutorial.
    I applaud Adobe for adding this functionality in LR4.  It was one of the most obvious lacking features in the previous version, and I've still been mostly doing all my printing through PS CS5.
    While soft-proofing is not a perfect replacement for test printing, I've been mostly satisfied with proofing in CS5.
    Proofing in LR4 seems a  little different, but by using a virtual copy it looks like if I use my printer/paper profile I should theoretically be able to not only be able to deal with color gamut issues, but also adjust contrast & brightness to more closely match my original developed image, and could compare the original with virtual copy in compare mode.  Is it that simple?  And if so, why is there a contrast & brightness adjustment in the Print module?  That latter adjustment would be similar to what one goes through in PS CS5 when soft-proofing prior to printing.  However, why have it if it can be done in the Develop module......and regardless, from the video tutorial it looks like you can't preview the image after making those adjustments in the print module nor compare it with the original......thus forcing one to make multiple prints until the result is satisfactory.
    Just seems to me there is a bit more tweaking to do in LR4 to make the soft-proofing more functional.  Or, perhaps I'm too stuck with the paradigm set forth for soft-proofing in PS and need someone to clarify how I can achieve the same result in LR just as confidently.

    Beaulin Liddell wrote:
    BTW, I've benefited immensly from your and Martin's Evenings books.......you've never steered me wrong.
    Thanks for the kind words...but LR4's soft proofing is worth the effort to use. It really is better than Photoshop's soft proofing. I'm still on the fence regarding VCs vs Snapshots for soft proofing It's a tossup but the VC part has been built in while making a snapshot wasn't.
    The advantage of LR4's soft proofing is you get the ability to do a Before/After while still using the full range of LR4's controls to adjust the printed version. Makes it really easy to nail great print (assuming you have good print profiles).
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  • CS4 - Match Print Colors vs Soft Proof (Proof Colors)

    Using a custom printer profile, when I check Match Print Colors in the Print dialog box, the preview closely matches the print. However, the image in the CS4 workspace (with Proof Colors checked) looks like the print preview with Match Print Colors unchecked. The main difference is that the Proof Colors image is brighter than the print preview or actual print. I have the same profile selected in each case. How can I get the Proof Colors view to match the Print dialog preview which more accurately matches the print? I've carefully checked all settings.

    To get the best soft proof for print you have to have two accurate color profiles in place.
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  • Soft proofing to sRGB not working as expected

    I've gone through three customer reps via chat on this, and none of them had a clue.
    I recently discovered the soft proofing capability in Lightroom 4, and watched an Adobe video about it. Looked pretty cool. I experimented with soft-proofing for printing to an Epson Artisan printer. I'd always struggled a little bit with prints being too dark, etc., but now I was able to produce the best prints I've ever had.
    But then I started to experiment with soft proofing for sRGB. My photo club takes photo submissions as sRGB, and they then show them on a monitor during meetings. Sometimes they don't look so good. So, I figured soft-proofing them first would help correct that.
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    I then deleted the soft proof virtual copy, and just exported the original as sRGB. Looked fine.
    This would seem to make the soft proofing to sRGB to be somewhat useless for me (at least for reds - seemed okay for the small number of other photos I experimented with that didn't have that much red).
    Just wondering if anyone else has had issues with this, or if I'm doing anything incorrectly, etc.
    Thanks!
    P.S. Update...  Last chat rep had me try something that seemed to work better. My photos are stored in Lightroom as JPGs with a color space of RGB and a color profile of ProPhoto RGB. If I export that photo to JPG / sRGB, then re-import it into Lightroom, and then do the soft proofing again, it works much better. The downside of this that the two-step process makes it a bit unusable for me.

    > if I'm doing anything incorrectly,
    You should not really try to do the bringing of the colors into gamut too much. I know the videos you see online show this but it is really counterproductive in many cases. You'll often completely desaturate or get really disagreeable hue shifts if you trust the out of gamut warnings as you have noticed. What you should do is turn on the softproof and check whether your image looks good and the colors don't shift too much. If they do or you lose essential detail, try to correct it using the HSL tools or local desaturation. The out of gamut warning is more useful when you are proofing to a printer profile and you might have colors that your display cannot show but your printer can print. For sRGB, not so much in my experience.
    > Last chat rep had me try something that seemed to work better. My photos are stored in Lightroom as JPGs with a color space of RGB and a color profile of ProPhoto RGB. If I export that photo to JPG / sRGB, then re-import it into Lightroom, and then do the soft proofing again, it works much better
    That's a silly answer that rep gave you. What happens when you export to sRGB is that all your colors will get truncated hard(it uses a relative coloremtric conversion) to the sRGB profile, so if there was detail there that you wish to preserve you just lost it and you won't be able to get it back. Of course if you then soft proof the sRGB jpeg to sRGB, you will have an easy time conforming it to sRGB, since it already is! The out of gamut warning it might show you on sRGB jpegs without any correction is not correct - a known bug or strangeness with how Lightroom handles these and just tiny touches on the sliders will make them disappear. It is fooling you and in fact you were better off not even trying to soft proof and simply exporting to sRGB and ignoring soft proofing.
    P.S. the monitor problems you have noticed in your photo club are probably more an issue of the monitor not being calibrated and probably not using a color managed application to show the images. If your monitor is calibrated and that one is too and using a color managed app to show the images should give you very good correspondance in color between your monitor and that one regardless of what color space you choose for the images. That might perhaps be a good thing for the club. You really need to be calibrating monitors and use only color managed apps for display.

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