Previewing Print Colors by Soft-Proofing

You can anticipate and avoid the most dramatic color printing surprises by taking advantage of soft-proofing (simulating printed colors) in Photoshop. Soft-proofing takes knowledge about your monitor and your final print conditions and adjusts the monitor image to display only the color range available under the targeted printing conditions—the device, the inks, the paper, and the print settings. What about the display you normally see? The normal monitor display in Photoshop and most other programs represents the full range of colors in the file itself, not how the colors are limited by particular printing conditions like CMYK inks on uncoated paper. That’s why you often see a mismatch between colors onscreen and in print from the same file.

Before you can soft-proof successfully, your system must be using an accurate color profile of your monitor, and you must also have an accurate color profile of your final printing conditions. You create an accurate monitor profile using monitor calibration hardware (the PANTONE Huey is a simple, affordable device of this type). You typically get an accurate print profile by obtaining it from your output service provider. It’s also possible for you to use a calibration product to create your own printer profile but that is usually best done by trained professionals. Photoshop includes some profiles, and your printer driver probably came with some, too, but those are generalized profiles that don’t represent the actual behavior of specific devices such as the printer on your desk.