The Lightroom Tutorial Series, Soft Proofing

Hi, welcome to my blog. Today I want to share with you how to Soft Proof inside Lightroom. Soft proofing is designed to predict what the colors are going to look like on a given paper, before you make a print. Back in the days of film, we used to make proofs (contact sheets) by printing a bunch of thumbnail sized images to a single print so we could analyze the negatives. Proofs were invaluable for evaluating the quality of your negatives, because not all negatives are keepers and would ever be a final print. In todays world we work with digital negatives and we have digital tools that can help us evaluate the quality of our files (digital negatives). If you are like me you make lots of prints, in my opinion a picture is not a picture until it’s a print, so soft proofing save me tons of time and money!

Printing is kind of expensive no matter how you decide to do it. If you work with a lab it might be cheaper than printing at your studio, but there are some downsides. First you have to pay for shipping, next it’s hard to dial in your prints to make a masterpiece if have to wait a week at a time to get the next version of your print. I mean it’s pretty rare to make a perfect print on the first try. There is some tweaking going on even if you have everything profiled and your printer is in the same room as your computer. Now imagine having to wait a week in between tries because the prints are enroute from a custom lab.

Soft proofing is designed to predict what the colors are going to look like on a given paper. Some files might have such vibrant color that they cannot be reproduced on a specific paper. Soft proofing lets you load a paper profile and do your testing way before you ever print a single piece of paper. Some people never soft proof, they just let the color fall where it land. There is no right or wrong way here, there is just final prints. If your prints look great, it matters not how you got there, I for one use soft proofing. Below is a video showing you how I like to use soft proofing as a tool to adjust files before I make my first print.