Soft Proofing

[ErnieLail]

I would like to implement a soft proofing at our company, but im not sure what all goes into it or if its a reliable means to represent press color. I have NO experience with soft proofing. Can someone please explain to me how it works?

Does acrobat use the destination profile of the PDF as an output profile and use the monitor's stock profile as the input profile? What if customers are viewing the PDF on an uncalibrated monitor with a generic sRGB monitor profile?

Any input would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

 

[Steve_S]

Ernie-

We use soft proofing for 70% of our proofs. There is a learning curve that you have to educate your clients through if you are going to rely on it for press output. There are so many variables involved that are out of your control, far beyond how you profile your PDF. However, when you get your clients to a comfortable spot with it, it works well. You are always going to have that handful of "special" clients where you need to do a contract proof - I wish I could tell you that you won't

 

[akalaray]

Softproofing

Softproofing

My policy on softproofs; they have to go through the rip, so the final output will match what goes to press.
Right now we send rastered files from our rip. Looking to send non rastered files, normalized PDFs

 

[xavier.grehant]

Color management with ICC profiles

Color management with ICC profiles

You may want to look at ICC profiles. Every image is expressed in a given colorspace, and in a perfect world every image has an embedded ICC profile that describes its colorspace.

Simply speaking: when you say a color in RGB (for screens, or CMYK for printers), you give its values on Red, Green, Blue axes (Resp. Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black). The problem is that every screen and every printer interprets these values in their own way. Therefore, in the absence of color management, or soft-proofing, you end up to see the same image with different colors on different screens.

If your digital image was created by a camera, the embedded profile in the image gives the exact transformation that converts its RGB encoding into an encoding in a standard colorspace: CIELAB. Everyone agrees on the meaning of a CIELAB encoding because it's based on perceptive measurements, not on arbitrary technical characteristics of some arbitrary hardware.

Your monitor, in turn, has its own ICC profile. If you're on Mac, your monitor's profile is presented by an application called ColorSync. If you're on Windows, it should have been installed in a specific directory when you first plugged in your monitor. If you have strong requirements on color accuracy, you should update your screen's profile regularly using a special device that takes a picture of your screen and measures how it renders colors. If you're not so hardcore on colors, you might rely on the factory profile that came with the monitor.

When you have both source and destination profiles, your color management system should be able to convert image colors in order to end up with the same colors on both ends. The ICC profile embedded in your image is used to convert from camera space to CIELAB, and the ICC profile of your monitor converts from CIELAB to monitor space.

Let's take another example. Say you've produced some artwork on Photoshop and you want to print it. The source profile is the ICC profile of your monitor. When you save your image in Photoshop, you have the option to include it in the metadata or not. Your destination profile is the printer's profile. A professional printer has its own color management system so that when you give it an image with embedded source profile, it will print it with the correct colors.

As you can see, it's not an easy task that you've been asked to do. There are open source color management engines out there that you can use. But you still need to develop the application around it. That's the bad news.

The good news is that at netsas.com we've done it already and we've got just what you need. It's called Shortcut. Its "your online personal space" where you organize and share images with your customers. It's all online so you don't need to install anything, neither do your clients. You just upload and send, and your customer receives a notification in their mailbox. They follow the link and find your files, and we make sure everyone sees the same colors. Wen you'll come back to Shortcut, you'll find their comments and you'll be able to upload new versions.

It's at netsas.com and you should be able to register for a free trial.

 

[Stephen Marsh]

What if customers are viewing the PDF on an uncalibrated monitor with a generic sRGB monitor profile?

There are different implementations by different vendors, such as Kodak Matchprint Virtual, Nustream Proofstream, Compose USA Visual Proof, Hamillroad Firstproof, WebProof.com, ProofHQ.com, Pentnet Proofmanager, Cyansoftware cyan eProof, Esko Webcenter etc.

As a master distributor for Kodak in Australia, the solution that we offer is Kodak Matchprint Virtual, which is also a part of collaborative package with Kodak InSite Creative Workflow System. Follow the links on the referenced pages for more basic info, demos etc.

Kodak Matchprint Virtual offers colour critical softproofing and has SWOP certification. Both parties need a qualified monitor that meets specific requirements and the monitors must be hardware profiled (with the profiling maintained on a regular basis). Of course, one can still use the proofing system for non colour critical work too (non certified monitors, certified monitor profiling out of date).


Best,

Stephen Marsh

 

[michaelejahn]

Sometimes you are the bug...

Sometimes you are the bug...

What if customers are viewing the PDF on an uncalibrated monitor with a generic sRGB monitor profile? !

-- and sometimes you are the windshield.

If you are viewing a PDF in the above conditions, this is what we call " believing is the tooth fairy".

If this were presented to me as the best possible senario for sign off before printing on critcal, color simulation of GRACoL, for example - I might suggest that this would be like "working the high wire without a net in a tornado - on fire"

Perhaps this might help you on your journey to the land of reliable soft proofing.

here is a link to a PDF you can download and print;

http://goo.gl/H64bq

Questions !

A. Does it look the same in your browser as it does in mine ? ( trick question - your answer should be "i have no way to verify that)

B. If you print it locally, does it look identical to your monitor (probably not would be my guess)

C. if you sent this to the guys who make the plates and print it on your printing press - does it look like A or B ? (again, I would be surprised to learn that you have implemented a color managed workflow)

The problem you need to solve is one of "is this worth the effort and investment"

Companies like JC Penney who need fast turn around still use physical proofs, even though they control the entire color process inside their buildings in Plano TX - from photography to PDF/X output.

Here are some pictures of the equipment and process they invested in;

https://picasaweb.google.com/michaelejahn/20080326_SID#

It is a journey.

At Compose, we offer G7 services - think of it like we are tour guides, and do this sort of thing for customer who are interested in learning how, and keep you from falling off a clif or being eaten by the lions.

( smile )

You can also hire a service to manage this process for you - an example of a good one is Integrated Color Solutions;

Home : Integrated Color Solutions

Hope this helps you on your journey !

 

[Correct Color]

Ernie,

I would like to implement a soft proofing at our company, but im not sure what all goes into it or if its a reliable means to represent press color. I have NO experience with soft proofing. Can someone please explain to me how it works?

Does acrobat use the destination profile of the PDF as an output profile and use the monitor's stock profile as the input profile? What if customers are viewing the PDF on an uncalibrated monitor with a generic sRGB monitor profile?

You've gotten some good information from some knowledgeable folks here, but in reading over it, I'm not sure anyone really succinctly answered your key questions.

So just to cut to the chase:

Soft proofing works just like any other kind of proofing: If you know the color space of the image you wish to proof, the color space of the final output device, and the color space of the proofing device; AND if the color space of the proofing device completely encompasses the color space of the final output device, then you tell the proofing device to reproduce the transformation of the image file into the final destination space, and that's your proof.

The process is exactly the same whether the proof is soft or hard.

So, for that reason, it's absolutely critical that your proofer color space be known and characterized. That would, of course, be your monitor profile when soft proofing. And for that reason, a soft proof viewed on an unprofiled monitor is useless.

As far as your questions specifically about PDF's: Hopefully you're not incorporating monitor profiles anywhere in your workflow other than as monitor profiles. They should never be used as color working spaces at all. The "input" profile(s) in a PDF should be whatever working spaces the elements in your file were created using, and the "destination" will be whatever you tell it to be, which will vary depending on your specific workflow conditions.

Mike Adams
Correct Color

 

[Lukas Engqvist]

Lol michael love the blue monitor they are looking at in the first screen that pops up at Integrated Color Solutions Guess the photographer had forgoten who he was working for, or they went and bought a stock image.

 

[michaelejahn]

it is all in what you are looking at...

it is all in what you are looking at...

Lol michael love the blue monitor they are looking at in the first screen that pops up at Integrated Color Solutions Guess the photographer had forgoten who he was working for, or they went and bought a stock image.

Or, from a different perspective, perhaps the target ciolor was that blue shirt the guy on the left is wearing.

( wink )

-- see attached.

 

[TerryWyse]

Your point xavier...other than promoting your own website?

You may want to look at ICC profiles. Every image is expressed in a given colorspace, and in a perfect world every image has an embedded ICC profile that describes its colorspace.

Simply speaking: when you say a color in RGB (for screens, or CMYK for printers), you give its values on Red, Green, Blue axes (Resp. Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black). The problem is that every screen and every printer interprets these values in their own way. Therefore, in the absence of color management, or soft-proofing, you end up to see the same image with different colors on different screens.

If your digital image was created by a camera, the embedded profile in the image gives the exact transformation that converts its RGB encoding into an encoding in a standard colorspace: CIELAB. Everyone agrees on the meaning of a CIELAB encoding because it's based on perceptive measurements, not on arbitrary technical characteristics of some arbitrary hardware.

Your monitor, in turn, has its own ICC profile. If you're on Mac, your monitor's profile is presented by an application called ColorSync. If you're on Windows, it should have been installed in a specific directory when you first plugged in your monitor. If you have strong requirements on color accuracy, you should update your screen's profile regularly using a special device that takes a picture of your screen and measures how it renders colors. If you're not so hardcore on colors, you might rely on the factory profile that came with the monitor.

When you have both source and destination profiles, your color management system should be able to convert image colors in order to end up with the same colors on both ends. The ICC profile embedded in your image is used to convert from camera space to CIELAB, and the ICC profile of your monitor converts from CIELAB to monitor space.

Let's take another example. Say you've produced some artwork on Photoshop and you want to print it. The source profile is the ICC profile of your monitor. When you save your image in Photoshop, you have the option to include it in the metadata or not. Your destination profile is the printer's profile. A professional printer has its own color management system so that when you give it an image with embedded source profile, it will print it with the correct colors.

As you can see, it's not an easy task that you've been asked to do. There are open source color management engines out there that you can use. But you still need to develop the application around it. That's the bad news.

The good news is that at netsas.com we've done it already and we've got just what you need. It's called Shortcut. Its "your online personal space" where you organize and share images with your customers. It's all online so you don't need to install anything, neither do your clients. You just upload and send, and your customer receives a notification in their mailbox. They follow the link and find your files, and we make sure everyone sees the same colors. Wen you'll come back to Shortcut, you'll find their comments and you'll be able to upload new versions.

It's at netsas.com and you should be able to register for a free trial.