soft proof color management for Pantone only workflow

[font_dork]

looking for the best way to color manage for soft proofing (.PDF) to clients in a PMS workflow. quick background: our work involves super fast turnaround, high volume screen and pad printing on garments and products. we screen and pad print up to 4 flat, non-overlapping PMS colors, manually separated vector art —no halftones or RIPs involved at all. for soft proofing we use a vector logo from Illustrator, paste it onto a .PSD of our product to roughly show the imprint and ink colors, drop that .PSD (and the vector logo) into an .INDD proof template and output as a .PDF soft proof to send to the customer for approval. i'm trying to figure out the best color profiles and settings to use for our soft proofs so our customers can see a *reasonably* accurate representation of the finished product. pretty much everything i've researched so far pertains to managing PMS or RGB to CMYK for sheet or web fed paper printing, but i've been striking out finding anything that might apply to our workflow. based on some feedback i've received in other forums, i've experimented with an Adobe RGB profile between all 3 softwares. based on what i've tested so far, i'm unsure if that's the best solution. any suggestions would be appreciated.

 

[Stephen Marsh]

Softproofing 101 - How will you control or qualify the client’s viewing conditions, hardware, calibration, profiling etc?

There are all sorts of things that you can do, however they will be governed by the above capabilities and limitations. I am not saying that this is not possible to do better or to try to setup reasonable expectations etc.

How many times have we all had a client remark “it did not look that way on my screen”. :]

You could make use of the forums search feature for a keyword such as “softproofing” as this has of course come up more than once in the past:

https://printplanet.com/search?q=softproof&searchJSON={"keywords":"softproof"}



Stephen Marsh

 

[Ulrich]

added to Stephens annotation:

Think about, that the respective deposited Lab-values in the different Pantone-Librarys (PANTONE coated+ or just Pantone coated - (without +)) could be different from the real colour, you will get from your vendor (additionally in dependence from different substrates...), if you want to combine color management with PMS!

Ulrich

 

[font_dork]

thanks, i'll try the search feature for keyword as suggested. let me say that by no means am i under the illusion that we can in any way control how our clients will view the softproof, and there will always be the "...doesn't look like what i see on my screen..." responses regardless, but i'd like to at least be confident that what i'm sending out is the best possible representation based on factors we can control.