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?.
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 turn soft proofing on or off
When you turn soft proofing on, colors in the document window, color palettes, and preview windows of dialog boxes appear different.
Simulating printer output may cause on-screen colors to appear dull because all colors are brought into a CMYK color space, which has a smaller gamut than an RGB color space.
To turn soft proofing on by default