K
Kenny Nyhus Fadil
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- #1
The first A3 print I ever pulled from my own printer had a sky the color of a bruise. On screen it was a clean, cold blue hour over a Swedish lake. On paper the blues had slid toward violet and the shadows under the pines had closed into one dark slab. I had spent ninety minutes on that edit. The printer spent four minutes undoing it.
Soft proofing is the fix, and it costs nothing but a few minutes before you press print. You switch your editing software to simulate the paper and ink you are about to use, then adjust a separate proof copy until the preview looks right. On my X-T5 files, with their rich saturated blues and deep shadow detail, one proof pass usually saves me two or three wasted sheets. If you print more than a handful of images a year, it pays for itself fast.
If what you actually need is the theory behind ICC profiles or how to calibrate the monitor itself, that lives in my color profiles for printing guide. Below is the proofing workflow, step by step, as it sits in the bigger picture of the photography printing guide.
Soft proofing makes your monitor imitate how a specific paper and ink combination will reproduce your image. It shows you the color and contrast shifts in advance, on screen, so you correct them in a copy of the file instead of discovering them on a sheet of expensive paper.
Here is the mechanism in plain terms. Your monitor and your printer cannot show the same range of colors. A good wide-gamut monitor can display saturated cyans and blues that a pigment printer on matte paper simply cannot lay down. When you print without proofing, the printer driver or the lab quietly squeezes those out-of-reach colors into the range it can manage, and you never get a say in how.
The soft proof runs that squeeze in software first. Your editor takes the paper profile, a small file that describes how that paper and ink behave, and previews the result. Now the compression happens in front of you. You see the blue sky flatten, the shadows lose a notch of separation, the white of the highlights drop to the actual white of the paper.
I think of it as a rehearsal. The print is the performance. Nobody sensible walks on stage without one.
One caution first. A soft proof is only as honest as the monitor showing it. If your screen is running too bright, you will fix a problem that is not on the paper, and make a new one. Get that sorted first using the monitor section of the color profiles guide, then come back here.
In Lightroom Classic you open the Develop module, tick the Soft Proofing box under the image preview, and choose a profile from the panel that appears. The background of the preview turns white, which is your sign that you are looking at the simulated print, not the normal edit.
Pressing S on the keyboard toggles the same thing, and I use that shortcut constantly, flicking between the normal view and the proof to see exactly what the paper takes away. Next, pick your profile from the dropdown. Your printer or lab will normally publish one profile per paper. If you have nothing for your paper, your lab will usually send it on request, and the paper makers publish theirs for common printers.
The panel gives you a few settings that matter more than the rest:
Capture One and Photoshop have their own versions of all this, with different names on the buttons but the same logic. Photoshop calls it Proof Setup. The steps below apply to any of them.
Perceptual compresses the whole color range gently so relationships between colors survive, while Relative Colorimetric leaves in-gamut colors alone and clips the ones that fall outside. For saturated landscapes, Perceptual is my usual start; for images with little out-of-gamut color, Relative often looks cleaner.
Do not take that on faith. This is exactly what the proof is for. Toggle the intent while watching the preview and the answer shows up on the screen.
Here is how the two behave on the kinds of files I shoot:
My rule is dull but effective. Switch to the gamut warning first. If a big chunk of the sky lights up with the warning color, I try Perceptual. If barely anything lights up, I try Relative and look at whether it added anything. When I cannot decide between the two on screen, I print a small test on the real paper and let the sheet settle it.
That last habit is worth copying. A 5×7 test strip of the critical crop costs a fraction of a full print, and it has caught more of my mistakes than any amount of staring at the monitor.
Because it shows the truth. Paper cannot be as bright as your backlit monitor, and printed black is never as deep as a screen black, so with Simulate Paper & Ink on, the preview loses contrast and the highlights go slightly dull. That dull view is what the print will look like.
I remember the first time I ticked that box. The picture went flat and grey, and I assumed something had broken. Nothing had. My eyes had simply spent years on a glowing rectangle and forgotten what reflected light looks like.
The two things it simulates are different:
So what do you do about the flat look? You do not panic and crank everything up in the main edit. You work on the proof copy, the part most guides skip.
If the finish of the paper is still undecided, my page on canvas versus fine art printing covers the substrate side, and the finish question comes before you proof, because the profile belongs to the paper.
Click Create Proof Copy and Lightroom makes a virtual copy tied to your chosen profile, leaving the original edit untouched. You then adjust that copy until the soft proof matches your intent, typically a small contrast lift, a little saturation back in the problem colors, and a touch more shadow detail.
Always work this way. The proof copy keeps your screen-optimised master and your print-optimised version side by side, and you never have to wonder which one you shipped to Instagram and which one went to the lab. I name mine with the paper in the title so I can find them two years later.
These are the adjustments I reach for, in roughly this order:
Toggle S after each change. If the proof and the normal view now feel like cousins instead of strangers, you are close.
A mistake I made for a long time: I would chase the proof until it looked identical to the unproofed edit. That is not the goal. The goal is a print that looks right in hand. Sometimes the proof will never match the screen, because the screen can do things the paper cannot, and accepting that saves hours.
Run a short checklist before you export: confirm the profile matches the exact paper, check the gamut warnings are quiet, view the proof at one hundred percent in the corners, and decide whether the printer or Lightroom manages color. Never let both do it at once.
That last point is the classic blunder. If you hand Lightroom a color-managed print job and then also tick color management in the printer driver, the transform is applied twice and the print comes out wrong in a very confusing way. One side decides. The other stays off.
My routine, in order, and it takes about two minutes:
If you send files to a lab instead, the checks change a little. Most online labs want an sRGB file and do the paper conversion themselves, which means soft proofing with their offered profile is the only way to preview what they will do. My comparison of online photo printing services goes into which labs publish profiles at all. And if you print on your own machine, the basics are in printing photos at home.
It is a waste when the print is a throwaway, when the subject is low in saturation, or when the lab applies its own conversion with no profile to proof against. For a snapshot you are mailing to a relative, a quick sRGB export is perfectly fine.
I do not proof everything. A 6×4 proof sheet of a dinner party does not need it. A large print of a landscape that I want to hang for ten years does. The decision tracks the cost of failure: paper, ink, shipping, and the sinking feeling when the big sheet comes out wrong.
There is also a limit to what proofing can tell you. It cannot reproduce the way a metallic or glossy surface catches room light, or the feel of a heavy cotton sheet. For that you need to look at real samples. Finish is a separate decision, which my page on glossy, metallic and matte paper handles by subject.
For a first pass, keep it small. Pick one image you care about, find the profile for the paper you actually own, make a proof copy, toggle the paper simulation, and print a small test next to the screen. Hold the two up in the same light. That ten-minute exercise teaches you more about your own printer than a month of reading.
For the full picture of where this step sits between the edit and the frame, go back to the printing guide.
Two outside references are worth bookmarking. The International Color Consortium publishes the ICC profile specification that all of this rests on, and the Adobe Lightroom Classic help pages document the Soft Proofing panel for each release.
Yes, if you print larger than a snapshot or care about color accuracy. One proof pass on a landscape file typically catches the saturated blues and deep shadows that paper cannot reproduce, which saves wasted sheets and ink.
Paper reflects light instead of emitting it, so it cannot match the brightness or black depth of a backlit monitor. With Simulate Paper and Ink on, the preview shows that loss honestly. Adjust a proof copy rather than your master edit.
Start with Perceptual for saturated landscapes and Relative Colorimetric for images with little out-of-gamut color, such as portraits. Toggle between them with the preview visible and keep whichever holds your key colors better. A small test print settles close calls.
Only if the lab publishes an ICC profile for its papers. Many do for their pro lines. If there is no profile, export in sRGB as instructed and treat the first print as the test.
Use a proof copy. It keeps your screen-optimised master intact and gives you a separate print version tied to one paper profile, so you never confuse the two later.
Soft proofing is the fix, and it costs nothing but a few minutes before you press print. You switch your editing software to simulate the paper and ink you are about to use, then adjust a separate proof copy until the preview looks right. On my X-T5 files, with their rich saturated blues and deep shadow detail, one proof pass usually saves me two or three wasted sheets. If you print more than a handful of images a year, it pays for itself fast.
If what you actually need is the theory behind ICC profiles or how to calibrate the monitor itself, that lives in my color profiles for printing guide. Below is the proofing workflow, step by step, as it sits in the bigger picture of the photography printing guide.
What Does Soft Proofing Actually Do Before You Print?
Soft proofing makes your monitor imitate how a specific paper and ink combination will reproduce your image. It shows you the color and contrast shifts in advance, on screen, so you correct them in a copy of the file instead of discovering them on a sheet of expensive paper.
Here is the mechanism in plain terms. Your monitor and your printer cannot show the same range of colors. A good wide-gamut monitor can display saturated cyans and blues that a pigment printer on matte paper simply cannot lay down. When you print without proofing, the printer driver or the lab quietly squeezes those out-of-reach colors into the range it can manage, and you never get a say in how.
The soft proof runs that squeeze in software first. Your editor takes the paper profile, a small file that describes how that paper and ink behave, and previews the result. Now the compression happens in front of you. You see the blue sky flatten, the shadows lose a notch of separation, the white of the highlights drop to the actual white of the paper.
I think of it as a rehearsal. The print is the performance. Nobody sensible walks on stage without one.
One caution first. A soft proof is only as honest as the monitor showing it. If your screen is running too bright, you will fix a problem that is not on the paper, and make a new one. Get that sorted first using the monitor section of the color profiles guide, then come back here.
How Do You Turn On Soft Proofing in Lightroom Classic?
In Lightroom Classic you open the Develop module, tick the Soft Proofing box under the image preview, and choose a profile from the panel that appears. The background of the preview turns white, which is your sign that you are looking at the simulated print, not the normal edit.
Pressing S on the keyboard toggles the same thing, and I use that shortcut constantly, flicking between the normal view and the proof to see exactly what the paper takes away. Next, pick your profile from the dropdown. Your printer or lab will normally publish one profile per paper. If you have nothing for your paper, your lab will usually send it on request, and the paper makers publish theirs for common printers.
The panel gives you a few settings that matter more than the rest:
- Profile: the printer, ink and paper combination. Match it to what will actually go through the machine, not to a similar paper you happen to have profiles for.
- Intent: how out-of-range colors are handled. I deal with this in its own section below.
- Simulate Paper & Ink: shows the paper white and the ink black. Brilliant, and also the setting that scares people first time.
- Gamut warnings: two small triangle icons in the histogram corners, one for the monitor and one for the destination. They paint the clipped colors so you can see where the damage is.
Capture One and Photoshop have their own versions of all this, with different names on the buttons but the same logic. Photoshop calls it Proof Setup. The steps below apply to any of them.
Which Rendering Intent Should You Pick: Perceptual or Relative Colorimetric?
Perceptual compresses the whole color range gently so relationships between colors survive, while Relative Colorimetric leaves in-gamut colors alone and clips the ones that fall outside. For saturated landscapes, Perceptual is my usual start; for images with little out-of-gamut color, Relative often looks cleaner.
Do not take that on faith. This is exactly what the proof is for. Toggle the intent while watching the preview and the answer shows up on the screen.
Here is how the two behave on the kinds of files I shoot:
| Situation | Perceptual | Relative Colorimetric |
|---|---|---|
| Saturated blue-hour sky, lots of cyan and blue | Keeps the gradation smooth, slightly less punch overall | Can band or flatten the deepest blues where they clip |
| Skin tones in a portrait | Safe, gentle shift | Often more accurate, since skin sits inside the gamut |
| Muted autumn forest, earthy tones | Can look slightly dull | Usually holds color better |
| Sunset with hot oranges and reds | Preserves the glow gradient | Risk of a hard edge where reds clip |
| Black-and-white conversion | Smooth tonal roll-off | Smooth too; difference is small |
My rule is dull but effective. Switch to the gamut warning first. If a big chunk of the sky lights up with the warning color, I try Perceptual. If barely anything lights up, I try Relative and look at whether it added anything. When I cannot decide between the two on screen, I print a small test on the real paper and let the sheet settle it.
That last habit is worth copying. A 5×7 test strip of the critical crop costs a fraction of a full print, and it has caught more of my mistakes than any amount of staring at the monitor.
Why Does Simulate Paper & Ink Make the Photo Look Worse?
Because it shows the truth. Paper cannot be as bright as your backlit monitor, and printed black is never as deep as a screen black, so with Simulate Paper & Ink on, the preview loses contrast and the highlights go slightly dull. That dull view is what the print will look like.
I remember the first time I ticked that box. The picture went flat and grey, and I assumed something had broken. Nothing had. My eyes had simply spent years on a glowing rectangle and forgotten what reflected light looks like.
The two things it simulates are different:
- Paper color: a warm, natural paper has a visible tint compared with a pure white screen. Matte cotton papers sit differently from bright white glossy stock. The preview shifts accordingly.
- Black ink density: every paper has a maximum black. On a matte paper it is noticeably shallower than on a glossy or lustre sheet, so the shadows lift.
So what do you do about the flat look? You do not panic and crank everything up in the main edit. You work on the proof copy, the part most guides skip.
If the finish of the paper is still undecided, my page on canvas versus fine art printing covers the substrate side, and the finish question comes before you proof, because the profile belongs to the paper.
How Do You Fix Color Shifts Using a Proof Copy?
Click Create Proof Copy and Lightroom makes a virtual copy tied to your chosen profile, leaving the original edit untouched. You then adjust that copy until the soft proof matches your intent, typically a small contrast lift, a little saturation back in the problem colors, and a touch more shadow detail.
Always work this way. The proof copy keeps your screen-optimised master and your print-optimised version side by side, and you never have to wonder which one you shipped to Instagram and which one went to the lab. I name mine with the paper in the title so I can find them two years later.
These are the adjustments I reach for, in roughly this order:
- Contrast: add a little back, since the paper took some. Small moves in the tone curve beat the global contrast slider because you can protect the highlights.
- Shadow lift: if the black point on the paper plugs up, open the shadows slightly so the detail under the trees survives.
- Targeted saturation: pull the out-of-gamut color back with the HSL panel, one channel at a time, rather than dragging the global slider. Blues and cyans are the usual offenders on my files.
- Highlights: make sure the brightest areas are not darker than the paper white will allow. If they are, you get a murky look with no sparkle.
- Sharpness: leave it alone here. Output sharpening for print is its own step, and I handle it in the output sharpening guide.
Toggle S after each change. If the proof and the normal view now feel like cousins instead of strangers, you are close.
A mistake I made for a long time: I would chase the proof until it looked identical to the unproofed edit. That is not the goal. The goal is a print that looks right in hand. Sometimes the proof will never match the screen, because the screen can do things the paper cannot, and accepting that saves hours.
What Should You Check Before You Send the File to Print?
Run a short checklist before you export: confirm the profile matches the exact paper, check the gamut warnings are quiet, view the proof at one hundred percent in the corners, and decide whether the printer or Lightroom manages color. Never let both do it at once.
That last point is the classic blunder. If you hand Lightroom a color-managed print job and then also tick color management in the printer driver, the transform is applied twice and the print comes out wrong in a very confusing way. One side decides. The other stays off.
My routine, in order, and it takes about two minutes:
- Open the proof copy and check the profile name is the right paper.
- Toggle the destination gamut warning and look for clipping in anything important, such as skin or the main subject.
- Zoom to one hundred percent in a corner and check nothing odd appeared in smooth gradients.
- Set the print module so that Lightroom manages color, with the same profile and intent chosen in the proof.
- Switch the printer driver’s own color management off.
- Print one small test of the most sensitive section.
If you send files to a lab instead, the checks change a little. Most online labs want an sRGB file and do the paper conversion themselves, which means soft proofing with their offered profile is the only way to preview what they will do. My comparison of online photo printing services goes into which labs publish profiles at all. And if you print on your own machine, the basics are in printing photos at home.
When Is Soft Proofing a Waste of Your Time?
It is a waste when the print is a throwaway, when the subject is low in saturation, or when the lab applies its own conversion with no profile to proof against. For a snapshot you are mailing to a relative, a quick sRGB export is perfectly fine.
I do not proof everything. A 6×4 proof sheet of a dinner party does not need it. A large print of a landscape that I want to hang for ten years does. The decision tracks the cost of failure: paper, ink, shipping, and the sinking feeling when the big sheet comes out wrong.
There is also a limit to what proofing can tell you. It cannot reproduce the way a metallic or glossy surface catches room light, or the feel of a heavy cotton sheet. For that you need to look at real samples. Finish is a separate decision, which my page on glossy, metallic and matte paper handles by subject.
For a first pass, keep it small. Pick one image you care about, find the profile for the paper you actually own, make a proof copy, toggle the paper simulation, and print a small test next to the screen. Hold the two up in the same light. That ten-minute exercise teaches you more about your own printer than a month of reading.
For the full picture of where this step sits between the edit and the frame, go back to the printing guide.
Two outside references are worth bookmarking. The International Color Consortium publishes the ICC profile specification that all of this rests on, and the Adobe Lightroom Classic help pages document the Soft Proofing panel for each release.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is soft proofing worth it for a home printer?
Yes, if you print larger than a snapshot or care about color accuracy. One proof pass on a landscape file typically catches the saturated blues and deep shadows that paper cannot reproduce, which saves wasted sheets and ink.
Why does my soft proof look duller than my edit?
Paper reflects light instead of emitting it, so it cannot match the brightness or black depth of a backlit monitor. With Simulate Paper and Ink on, the preview shows that loss honestly. Adjust a proof copy rather than your master edit.
Should I use Perceptual or Relative Colorimetric?
Start with Perceptual for saturated landscapes and Relative Colorimetric for images with little out-of-gamut color, such as portraits. Toggle between them with the preview visible and keep whichever holds your key colors better. A small test print settles close calls.
Can I soft proof for an online print lab?
Only if the lab publishes an ICC profile for its papers. Many do for their pro lines. If there is no profile, export in sRGB as instructed and treat the first print as the test.
Do I need a proof copy or can I edit the original?
Use a proof copy. It keeps your screen-optimised master intact and gives you a separate print version tied to one paper profile, so you never confuse the two later.