Page 15 - Lightroom Magazine Issue 28

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soft proofing
The soft-proofing feature in Lightroom lets you pre- visualize how a print will look so you can apply the neces- sary tone and color tweaks to achieve a printed result that more closely matches expectations. This not only saves you time and materials, it can also help you see your photos in a completely new light. First, enabling soft proofing in the Develop module previews the photo against a white background. This is critical for making the correct decisions about the print brightness. All too often, Lightroom’s dark user interface can lead you to creating photos that print too darkly. A dark back- ground is deceptive if the final outcome is a photo on a white background. Most printed photos are set against white, and most Web photos appear against white, too. For example, how often have you exported a photo from Lightroom to go on Facebook and found later that the pictures look darker than you remembered? That’s because you judged the tone balance with the photo seen against a gray surround.
As soon as you make the first adjustment, Lightroom prompts you to create a new soft proofing virtual copy. Usu- ally it’s best to create a new proof version so you have a separate virtual copy image from which to print. The Soft Proof preview lets you select the ICC profile for the media you’re going to print to and choose between a Perceptual or Relative rendering intent. You don’t have to understand too much about what these options mean; just switch between one and the other and decide for yourself which looks best. The profile is used to simulate the color gamut and tone range of the intended print output. The flattened contrast preview indicates the likely tone range and darkness of the black point. You can compensate for this by increasing the tone contrast, but a better approach is to increase the Clarity, which boosts the midtone contrast without alter- ing the global contrast. The color preview can help you decide whether it’s necessary to increase the Vibrance, or whether to adjust individual colors using the HSL panel controls. All in all, the soft-proofing process can help you become a more knowledgeable and better printer. n
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