Mike Chaney's Tech Corner

New to QU.
I have profiled my monitor and printer paper/ink combination with a Xrite i1 Studio.
Selected my printer profile.
Placed an image into the Queue which looks good.
When I click on the softproof button the image now looks flat and pale.
Putting that image into the Editing window the image no longer looks pale and flat.
Is that as it should be or am I missing a setting somewhere?
Should I be able to correct the flat/pale softproof image?
Thank you for any help.
John

Sounds about right. The computer is matching your monitor profile against the printer profile. The printer profile is based on the paper brand and coating and type.So if matte happens to be selected for the media type, that profile will be less of a match because the matte paper profile has a smaller color gamut. Besides, sodftproofing tells you little when you are printing. Just print.
Fred

Thank you very much for your quick reply Fred and for the great videos of which I have watched many.
If soft proofing is showing a pale/flat image and you are telling me to go ahead and print anyway, what is the point of seeing a soft proof?
Surely, the soft proof is telling me how the image is going to look when I print it with the printer profile?
If the soft proof image is pale and flat should I not be able to edit it?
Thank you.

I alluded to softproofing being useless for anything, in my opinion.  It is a geek sort of tool that will show the color gamut of the paper vs. the out of gamut areas of the very bright colors which again depends on the paper. Nothing to adjust... Hopefully, the printer profile made for that paper will compensate and your print will be excellent.
Just be careful to tell Qimage the proper paper type with the matching profile, and the nax quality setting i the driver for that paper. Also set matching to OFF or NONE in the driver. Qimage will remember it.

Enjoy.
Fred

That's a pretty standard complaint in the industry: "my soft proof looks dull".  Fred jumped straight to the best answer: don't depend on soft proofs!  Now I'll handle the in-between.

A soft proof depends heavily on three things: (1) your monitor profile being accurate, (2) your printer profile being accurate, (3) assumptions about what lighting you use for your prints.  The easy answer here is that what you see is expected: trying to emulate a paper print on a monitor is going to look dull because your prints can't produce their own light and the prints won't have the dynamic range of your monitor.  It's like sitting in a dark theater for 3 hours and walking out into bright sunlight: you're blinded by the sunlight and everything looks washed out.  Which one is "wrong"?  The theater lighting or the sunlit outdoors?  You are comparing apples and oranges: like printing a picture of an orange... ON an apple!  So for judging what the print will actually look like to you, in your lighting conditions, soft proofing is terrible!

So what's it used for?  Basically looking at the overall representation of the image to see if anything stands out: think "it's all relative" here.  If you pull up the soft proof and let your eyes adjust to the soft proof for 15-20 seconds, you can look at the picture as a whole to see if anything looks out of balance.  For example, you could have taken a picture of a flower garden and in the soft proof you notice that all the flowers look reasonable except the red flowers don't have any detail compared to the yellows, blues, and purples.  That might prompt you to change the soft proof to perceptual intent to see if it improves that particular image.  If so, that red flower might have been far enough out of gamut that you needed to switch to perceptual from your normal relative colorimetric mode on that one print.  And so on.

But a soft proof is never to be used to assume you are looking at an accurate representation of the print you are going to get!  Soft proofing simply does not work that way.  It has no idea about your lighting (for the print) and not only will some colors be out of gamut for your printer but you also have to think about the return trip which most people ignore: your monitor will also not be able to reproduce some of the colors that your printer can!  And for those colors that the printer can produce but the monitor can't: what are they going to look like on a soft proof when your monitor can't display them?

Bottom line: always print.  Use soft proofing only if you believe you have some colors that may be out of range and you want to get a general idea of how they will look compared to the rest of the print.

Mike

Mike and Fred. Thank you both for your explanations.
It was that Adobe seem to make a big deal for soft proofing that I thought that was the way to go.
I will skip it. :D
Cheers
John

John,
Welcome, and feel comfortable to be part of the forum group, sometimes asking and some times  answering.
There are always new Qimage people joining..... so unlike many other forums, we repeat answers all the time.
So ask anything anytime.
Fred