Soft proofing

Soft proofing provides an on-screen preview of a document as it will appear when it is reproduced by a specific printer or displayed on a specific monitor. Unlike the “hard-proofing” technique that is used in a traditional printing workflow, soft proofing lets you look at the final result without committing ink to paper. You can verify whether the color profile of the document is suitable for a specific printer or monitor and avoid unwanted results.

Top left: An RGB color profile is assigned to the document. Middle and right: Assigning a specific CMYK profile allows an on-screen simulation of the printed output.

To simulate the output colors that are produced by a device, you need to choose the color profile of the device. Because the color spaces of the document and device are different, some document colors may not have matches in the gamut of the device color space. You can enable the gamut warning, which lets you preview the on-screen colors that cannot be reproduced accurately by the device. When the gamut warning is enabled, an overlay highlights all the out-of-gamut colors for the device that you are simulating. You can change the color of the out-of-gamut overlay, and you can also make it more transparent to see the underlying colors.

The gamut warning highlights colors that a printer or monitor cannot reproduce accurately.

You can change how out-of-gamut colors are brought into the gamut of the proof profile by changing the rendering intent. For more information, see What is a rendering intent?.

You can preserve the RGB, CMYK, or grayscale color values of the document when soft-proofing. For example, if you are soft-proofing a document to be printed to a printing press, you can keep the original document CMYK color values in the soft proof. In this case, all colors will be updated on-screen, but only the RGB and grayscale color values of the document will be changed in the soft proof. Preserving the CMYK color values can help you prevent unwanted color conversions in the final output.

If you often need to soft-proof documents for a specific output, you can create and save custom proof presets. You can delete the presets that you no longer need at any time.

You can save soft proofs by exporting them to the JPEG, TIFF, Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF), or Corel PHOTO-PAINT (CPT) file format. You can also print proofs.

By default, soft proofing is disabled when you start a new document or when you open a document. However, you can make sure that soft proofing is turned on by default at all times.


To	Do the following
Simulate the output of a specific device	From the Simulate environment list box, choose the color profile of the device.
Keep specific color values unchanged	Enable the Preserve { numbers check box. Depending on the color profile in the Simulate environment box, the check box lets you preserve CMYK, RGB, or grayscale color values.
Change the rendering intent	Choose a rendering intent from the Rendering intent list box.
Enable the gamut warning	In the Gamut warning area, enable the Out-of-gamut colors check box.
Change the color of the out-of-gamut overlay	In the Gamut warning area, choose a color from the color picker.
Change the transparency of the out-of-gamut overlay	In the Gamut warning area, type a value in the Transparency box. The value should be between 1 and 100.
Save a custom proof preset	Choose the settings that you want, click the Save button , and then type a name in the Save preset as dialog box. Out-of-gamut settings are not included in the proof preset.
Choose a proof preset	From the Proof preset list box, choose a preset.
Delete a proof preset	Click the Delete button .