Disappointed with Your Prints? - Learn how to SoftProof in Lightroom Classic

hello and welcome to another prevailer light lightroom quick tip today we're going to be covering the subject of soft proofing uh print printing can be a little formative a little task for people to get their head around and it's it's incredibly complicated and it doesn't need to be but unfortunately it is trying to match your monitor to a particular printer to a particular ink to a particular piece of paper okay all affect how that final image is going to look when you print it okay and this doesn't matter whether you're using your own home printer or whether you're sending it out to a service like bay photo to have it printed there okay the rules all apply and that is we need to do as much color matching and prepping that we can do so that we're pretty close to guaranteed to getting the image that we want okay like we edited so we look at this photo here and we can see okay i finished adding it it's beautiful it's exactly the way i want the contrast is perfect i'm happy with the image i'm ready to print now the first thing you need to do is is my monitor calibrated okay if it's not you need to go out and buy a color calibration puck numerous manufacturers make it color monkey i write write display spider is another famous one they're all great it doesn't matter which one you buy buy whatever's within your budget they range anywhere from you know sixty nine dollars all the way up to three hundred dollars okay you don't need anything but the basic uh color management to get your colors right on your monitor okay so that's step one okay so once you've done that and you've calibrated your monitor it's now to work in lightroom and get this printer ready for print because we have a particular paper a printer and everything that we want to use so we're going to go to soft proofing right down here and below now if you don't see this all right if you don't see this toolbar just hit t okay t will turn on the toolbar automatically for you so just again t and if you still don't see soft proofing just come all the way over to the right and then select soft proofing there so it'll appear on the menu okay so i'm going to go ahead and check that now you need to be in the develop module to do any of this of course all right whoa what just happened look at this my whole picture changed what the heck this looks terrible this is what i want soft proofing now is doing it look it's already set to my paper in my printer it says hey if you're going to use this printer and this particular paper this is what it's going to look like when you print it and i'm going whoa this is not what i want i want it to be the way i edited it okay now this is the part that frustrates people the most they don't know this okay and so we waste a lot of ink we waste a lot of paper or money or all the above all right here we go icc profiles these are okay these are what came with my printer okay i downloaded them from canon and installed them on my computer and i have a long list of icc profiles now if you don't see an icc profile that you want to use okay let's say you use bay photo for example all right so let me come up here and okay bay photo one of the most popular and one well i recommend print houses okay they do fantastic work top quality and you go to their site and just go do a search okay for icc profiles all right and then everyone will have an icc profile page and then you can download the icc profiles for this print house and then you can do soft proofing so that it matches uh bay photos labs okay so self easy but you've got to turn around and do it if you have third parties paper like say you use some exotic paper that you found and you like you can also download the icc profiles from paper manufacturers okay almost everyone is free okay all right so today i'm just going to show you how i do it with a canon here i'm selected on a pro 100 color printer and i'm on a fine art museum quality and you can see what it's done to my photo okay it's really done a number on it there's my original edited photo and boy am i flat and drabbed and and lost contrast and everything and that's not what i want so with soft proofing okay it enables us to edit the photo all right so that we can get the photo the way we want on the paper to come out so the first step is we select our paper and our target and then we have uh perpetual and relative okay the short story it is without going over anything keep it on perpetual okay relative is just going to turn your things into flat messes all right all right so if i if i click on flat you see how it even flattens it even more okay so keep it on perpetual right so you have your target you have your thing and now remember i told you it matters what paper you use it matters what printer you use what inks and so forth it does so much so if i turn around and i look up here on the histogram i have two rectangles the first one on the left is the monitor gamut and you see when i hover over it look at the blues that come into the in the water here they're saying hey in those particular areas your monitor doesn't even support those colors okay a lot of people get really frustrated when they buy a cheap monitor and they go oh man what do you mean my monitor doesn't support the colors all right the right one look at that old red alright now this is showing the gamut warnings from my paper it's saying anything in red i can't do it i can't i can't duplicate that gamut with this paper okay so let me change the paper so i'm gonna i'm gonna select a a pro crystal see how that is and i'm gonna go over together and you see there's no warnings all right i come over to the define art and i got all kinds of warnings now this is understandable because fine art matte paper uh everything is going to be flatter it's not going to support the color range of a gloss paper excuse me okay so now we understand this now all we need to do is make a virtual copy of this photo all right and we did there okay so now we can turn around and we can edit this photo correcting what we need to do now this is personal choice how you like to edit some people like to just take the photo here and soft proofing and edit it accordingly and then they're done other people like to turn around and say well i'd like to work side by side and see the two images okay and then keep matching them back and forth as they edit which is the way you're comfortable with is great okay all right so with soft proofing on i can edit this photo and look what's wrong and then make adjustments because i'm on a virtual copy now okay the original won't be touched all right so now i'm on the printing virtual copy so i can adjust the colors maybe down a little bit uh i definitely got to bring contrast back in because i've lost so much contrast okay that's looking better my whites seem a little bit bright so maybe a touchdown okay uh my shadows looking at my dark areas do i wanna do i wanna bring in the shadows uh more and my whites do i still want to bring them down okay and i've lost a little bit of sharpness so maybe i'm going to give a little bit of clarity back okay a little clarity and then i can continue on down the line so again contrast you can bring it up okay and now you can turn around and look at the before and afters and compare them from the original uh to the proof okay there's the the before which is the original and then there's the the proofing that i'm working on okay and then once you're happy you're on the virtual copy you can print it out then on that paper okay so i know that's a little frustrating it's a lot of work to work with it but it's worth it in the end okay so that's basically soft proofing all right so again just a reminder gotta calibrate your monitor okay don't even attempt to do soft proofing because your prints will never match your monitor you have to calibrate your monitor first once you've done that then you go in and do a soft proofing and you edit your photo for the paper and printer that is targeted and then this will give you a good idea of what your print's going to come out like now just to show you here i have an edit that i did right i could turn around and put it on gloss paper and look at the difference that gloss so maybe i want to use gloss paper for this image all right i can come in and you know change it okay and i go wow this this paper does a nice job here maybe i want to use this picture uh with this paper all right again that's all personal taste and so hopefully you found this useful or a little less frustrating i know printing can be incredibly frustrating but the soft proofing feature can save you some money save you some time and frustration so until next week you guys take care you

Channel: Len Erickson

Views: 583

Keywords: softproofing, Lightroom, how to, tutorial, printing, calibration

Id: 6ASfFdIvm9s

Length: 13min 1sec (781 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 11 2021