SOFT PROOFING in PHOTOSHOP // Fotospeed Tutorial

[Music] hello in this video i'm going to be looking at how to soft proof your images and so we can use this tool to create amazing prints coming out your printer and the soft proofing tool can help us to do this so how does soft proof work well basically it simulates how a custom profile or printer profile is going to affect the color of your picture and it's going to do that on screen also it will try and emulate the paper white balance and it will also try and emulate how the ink is going to react with that paper now there's a few things we need before we get started on soft proofing the number one thing you need is a calibrated monitor because we can profile the printer but if the color isn't the same going forward then we just need to update those profiles and make them correct the next thing you need is a printer profile like i just said we need a profile to make things consistent as well now this can be a generic profile but i highly recommend having a custom profile made as well and it is free with photo speed it just costs the sheet of a paper to print the profile in chart and the cost of a stamp to send it into us and this will produce the best color your printer is capable of so those are the two main things you need to be able to do this also i should add you do need a piece of software that has the ability to produce a soft proof for you i'm going to be using photoshop to do this um but i will do a separate little video on how we can do this in lightroom as well so please if you're a lightroom user please find that as well in photoshop you'll find the soft proof menu under view at the top here we go to proof setup then custom now this brings up this box here for us and this is our soft proof panel should we say now the top bit we have a device to simulate which is going to be our printer and this is where we assign the profile for that printer so we can put any profile what we have in there which is the paper we're going to be printing on so if i put smooth cotton in there because that's what i'm going to print on and then underneath we've got preserve rgb numbers now always leave this box unticked because we don't need it for the purposes we're going to be using and as you can see it just takes all the color out so it's just awful so what we want to do is we want to then go down to rendering intent and this is where we can select if we're having relative or perceptual rendering detail and we can even have a look at what saturation and absolute does as well and we can use those rendering intents as well but it just gives an idea relative and perceptual the ones we're going to be looking at today we'll just see which one we prefer i'm going to pop it on relative also black point compensation you can tick this on and off and you can actually see what it does so it affects if you tick it off and you can see with this paper type everything is going to be really blocky and horrible but if we keep it ticked it just starts to bring everything back a little bit for us there the other options what we can do is we can simulate the paper color which is the white point of the paper and simulate black ink so that is going to be the contrast and the density and the dynamic range of the print so how the ink is going to interact with the paper as you can see if i take it on and off it just goes a little bit foggy so we just need to bring that back in a little bit as well so i always don't generally tick simulate paper and color and usually leave that unticked because i was always taught that your eye will adjust for the color anyway but the black ink i will tick because i just want to bring this the black ink i will tip because i want to bring in the backing the contrast of this picture and make it pop again so just now click ok because we're all set up there we've set up our proof that's going to go over the top okay so we have our soft roof over the top and we know there's a soft proof reply because if we go up into our file name up here it actually says the profile in brackets at the end so we know there's a soft proof applied to here and if we wanted to turn it off we go up to view and we tick or we untick should i say proof colors or press the command or control key if you're on a pc and then the letter y it'll go on and off for you so we can switch between the two okay so now we've turned the soft proof on now i see there's two ways we can use soft prefim now the first one is to create another picture that we can then alter the color on and produce an accurate replica of what we edited on our screens to start with if that makes sense so let me show you so here we have a smooth cotton soft proof applied to this picture if i go to layer duplicate layer and i'm just going to duplicate this image as a new document just there now this one doesn't have the soft print applied so we can flip between the two and we can try and make this soft proof one look like this original edit here that is one way to use soft briefly and probably the most common the way i use soft briefing is to actually edit my image for the paper now this is probably the artist in me coming out but i see that i'm going to pick smooth cotton for this image here so i'm going to edit for smooth cotton i'm not going to do a general edit and then try and fit it to smooth cotton i'm going to edit it for smooth cotton using the soft proof tool and i'm going to show you how to do that now now we have the soft proof assigned here and we've got smooth cotton profile assigns which we can see from the name at the top here now what i want to do now is go into view and i just want to go into proof setup again i just want to check how i've got things set just to make sure nothing's changed which is fine i have everything ticked i should have ticked so i'm just going to click ok now the next thing i'm going to do is i'm going to turn on the gamma awning this will highlight areas which are out of color gamma so over here we have big blocks now this looks like there's shadow detail being blocked in here so i'm going to start by using the dodge tool and about 50 percent watch you know i'm going to put up to about 60 and i'm making sure i've got it on the shadows and protect tones is ticked then i'm just going to start going over these details here now this will bring in i'll start to bring in should i say that detail that we've lost now i'm just going to turn off color gamut wall the warning and just start to blend it in a little bit more so we're just a little bit we go too much just click back just needs a little bit in here so it looks right just to bring that in there okay now we'll go back and turn the gamut warning back on looks a lot better in there now we still got parts in there but we are going to have a solid black as well don't forget see we're not going to get perfect because there will come a point when the printer says no more or the profile says the printer can produce no more so it's a lot better in there i'm just going to go with the boat as well in here these parts as well now in here it may be that there's some midtones need bringing out so i'm just going to bring those out yeah a few little mid tones in there and there could be even some highlights as well so i'm just going to bury very careful when you do the highlights because it can look a little bit too much but i think we're okay there okay now in here just going to use the shadow detail again and get a bigger brush and just go over the house i'm just going to turn off the gown warning again just come back now i'm just going to do a layer adjustment as well i'm just going to do a human saturation layer adjustment with the color gamut on just going to alter saturation of the print just so we can try and bring this down ever slightly try and get that's completely gone in there now i'm going to do another layer adjustment of levels and this is so i can start to bring back a bit of the punch of that image so you can see we've got a big gap here so i'm just gonna what i call pinch the levels as you see the gamut warning comes back straight away but we can try just alter that and i want it a little bit it's going darker i'm gonna have a little bit brighter to be honest there i just want to bring these blacks in a bit as well because i know and now we'll go back to the gamut awning and as you can see these have all come we've got a little bit of these coming back in now so we just need to follow dodge these back out because we don't want all this darkness in here now between editing the paper for paper and editing to match your original edit there isn't really a lot of difference in the techniques you're going to be using it's just your final outcome i personally don't want to look at that edit i made always made for me should i say i just want to edit for what i'm going to get on this paper i always go backwards and forwards between them so we can just see what is happening and if we're creating a mess basically underneath which we could have a little bit here so i'm just going to bring that back in with the burn tool a little bit and again we're just painting with the the tools we have um i just bring this in a little bit so i'm just going to start creating a bit more effect in here as well let me just keep going until we're happy always checking that gamut warning just to make sure you've got things coming through so if we did go between the two we have this picture here we've got that he's going to lighten up and we could say that we need we do need a little bit more contrast it's probably a little bit too much in here perhaps might be reaching the point of no return now really what the printer can produce and there's limits of this paper now i might just do one final adjustment now i may just go into the curves i'm just going to have a quick look just to see that makes any difference i'm just going to switch it on and switch it off actually i prefer it without a bit punchier and maybe just fine tune the saturation as well so now we've kind of got a print on the screen and we've edited it to the paper so this print will look different to if we printed this on a luster as well and that's the thing you've got to edit for the paper you're working on if you just do one universal print it will look very different on very different types of paper this is the look i would like for smooth cotton it may be a different look i go for if i'm printing on say a luster or brighter just because the paper will be able to do more for me i'll be able to put a little bit more punch in there as well the mac papers do tend to like the more subtler tones so i hope that's helped a little bit the only thing left to do is to print this so we go to print and now photoshop will ignore the soft proof we've done we're going to be applying the profile in the color management section here so it doesn't need to apply the soft proof to it it will print what is underneath this soft proof so if we turn off proof colours you'll see what we're actually going to be printing that doesn't look half bad actually but however when we print it on the paper it will come out a little bit more like that i'd say it'll come out with a little bit more punch as well thanks much you

Channel: Fotospeed

Views: 935

Keywords: Fotospeed, Printing, photo, photography, black and white, colour, print, fotospeed, printpaper, canon, sony, dji, film, digitalprinting, colourmanagement, landscape, portrait, adobe, adobelightroom, lightroom, tutorial, B&W, adobe lightroom, fsfeatured, apple, mac, photoshop, art, epson, nikon, softproof, softproofing, learn

Id: nRR46FQrWsI

Length: 16min 41sec (1001 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 25 2021