How to Soft Proof a Photo in Lightroom Correctly

hello I'm Robin Worley welcome to Lenz crafts today we're taking a look at how to soft proof in Lightroom now if you've ever tried to print any of your own images you may have run across problems when the print doesn't look like the screen one of the ways to fix this is through soft proofing but there's a lot of misinformation around there and actually there's three common myths that we're going to look at today and dispel and I'm going to show you how to soft proof properly using Lightroom for this example I've actually come to use an old version of Lightroom so I'm looking at Adobe Lightroom 5 couple of reasons for doing this one is that a lot of you out there are still on older versions and I want to show you you can actually soft proof properly using these older versions the other one I'm actually gonna say for the end of this video and I'll explain why I've chosen to go back to Lightroom 5 so in this example I'm going to use an image here that I've already selected and at the moment I'm in the library mode in Lightroom if I'm gonna soft proof I need to do it in the develop module nope that confuses a lot of people because although soft proofing is to do with printing you actually need to go into develop and the reason for that is because soft proofing is about fixing your photo ready for print so the first myth I want to dispel is the fact that soft proofing isn't just a one-click change it's not something you do and then it's done it's actually a process of preparing an image ready for print let's have a look now at the image here you can see it and one of the things I like to change is the background color here at the moment it's gray and I'm going to change that to white and the reason I want to change it to white is because I print a white paper so having a white background is going to look much more like the print and once it's mounted now if your version of Lightroom supports soft proofing you're going to see an option down here that says soft proof now at the moment mine isn't showing up and the reason for that is because I've not turned the option on down here know that I have my soft proofing option down here I can click that and I'm now in soft proofing mode there you'll notice when I did that that the background to the image turned to gray and that's because you now have many more options here around how you want that background to look so I'm actually going to choose paper white because this simulates the white of a piece of paper the other thing you'll notice is that my histogram expanded here to offer some soft proofing options when your soft proofing the first thing to realize is that you're actually going to have to adjust your image to prepare it for print and that means getting it right so rather than adjust the original image what we're going to do is create a soft proof copy or a proof copy and that basically creates a virtual copy of my image it duplicates it if I look down here you can see we've got a virtual copy and you can tell it's a virtual copy because the corner is turned over so I'm just hide that again we know in the proofing mode this is where the next myth comes in you need to select the right printer profile for the paper that you're going to be printing to in combination with your printer so I I print using an Epson pro 3 8 8 oh and if I'm printing to archival mapped paper you can see here it's one of the options if I'm going to use that printer with say some oyster paper I need to switch to that paper I'm going to show you I'm going to carry on though with the archive on that because I use that quite a lot if I didn't see the correct profile for the 3 8 8 oh I can't go off and use a different Epson printer it just will produce the wrong result equally if you don't have the right paper profile you're going to get the wrong result as well the image you see on-screen needs to match the printer and paper combination you're using and that's done through the profile so it's no good using a different profile in a later video I'm actually going to show you how to get some of these profiles and where you can install them on your computer but for the moment let's assume you've got the right profile that you want now the next you've got is this intent and this is how colors are handled in the image and you can either have perceptual all relative and actually it does make a difference the difference here with this image is quite minor but it's mainly to the blues as I'm switching between them you'll see that one blue is more aqua whereas the other blue is more a navy blue and you can also see my histogram up here changing as I switch between the two when you come to print later you'll have to make sure you make that selection again so I'm going to choose relative we won't you bother with perceptual because I like the blue that the relative creates now the other option you've got on here is simulate paper and ink now when I click that you'll notice that the image goes quite done and what's happening is the computer or Lightroom is simulating the effect of applying ink onto a mat paper now a lot of people don't use this simulate paper in ink because they think that it's made the image look that actually what it's done is it's made the image look like the printed version will appear it hasn't changed anything all it's done is simulated the effect of printing now at this point I want to show you how I go about soft proofing so I've made my proof copy I've selected my profile I selected my rendering intent and I've also clicks simulate paper and ink I'm now gonna come down here and use a side by side preview now what I'm seeing over on the left is the original image that I'd prepared on the right what I'm saying is the soft proof copy and the soft proof doesn't look quite like the original print it actually lacks a bit of contrast it lacks a bit of saturation now before I print it my job is to make this image on the right or look like the one on the left and if I can do that I will actually create a good soft proof that when printed is going to look like the original and that's the third myth people think just by having clicked the option to soft proof that it makes their image somehow look like or appear on paper as it does on screen it doesn't you have to make changes to the image so in this instance I'm going to come down here I'm going to add in some contrast because I can see contrast is like ink I'm going to increase the saturation very slightly and I'm also going to cool the image very slightly because it doesn't appear quite as blue the other thing you often find when you're printing an image is that you lose the clarity so I'm now going to add some clarity back in the print version know is looking quite near to the original image I'm happy with that I'm now able to go and print the soft proof copy in the print module quite successfully and have it appear just as I'm seeing it on screen now so that's the image as it would appear I'm quite happy with that I can go and print it so just to recap soft proofing isn't a one-click change you can't just click the soft proof option down at the bottom left and your image will come out right you have to make changes you have to use the right profile for your printer and paper combination that you're going to be using and the final thing is once you've clicked the soft proofing options you have to make changes and adjust your soft proof if you don't do that the image is never going to match the original now at the start of this video I said that I was using Lightroom 5 and there was two reasons for that this is the second reason of no switch to the Lightroom classic CC which is version 2017 point 1 and this has just been released in January of 2018 at the moment I've got the same image up on screen I've got it in soft proofing mode and I'm comparing the master image on the left with the proof copy on the right what was happening before in the earlier versions of Lightroom is that when I click this simulate paper and ink option it would create a difference in the image that would simulate the fact that I've put ink to a mat paper now in this version it's not happening and I don't know why when I find out I'm going to actually post something on one of my blogs or I may publish something else onto YouTube but there definitely seems to be a problem here and I can't seem to find out anything about it either so it's happened relatively recently because I print all the time and it's not something I've seen before if you watch the histogram I'm still getting the change when I switch between the perceptual and the relative but I'm not getting any change at all when I click the simulate paper and ink so something's definitely different around the way soft proofing is working in the latest version hopefully I'll get to the bottom of that soon I'll be able to publish something and share it with you I'm Robin Worley you've been watching Lenz crafts see you soon 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Channel: Robin Whalley

Views: 35,715

Keywords: Lenscraft, Lenscraft Photography, Robin Whalley, Lightroom Classic CC, Lightroom CC, Adobe Lightroom, Soft Proof, Soft Proofing, How To Soft Proof, digital photography, image editing, printer profile, photo printing, printing photos, printing photos at home, printing photography, lightroom soft proofing, how to soft proof in lightroom, soft proofing in lightroom cc, soft proofing in lightroom, soft proofing tutorial

Id: j48ZcMJp47o

Length: 9min 44sec (584 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 05 2018