Is It Possible to Save a Soft-Proofed File?

RM
Posted By
Reed_Markley
Jan 13, 2009
Views
778
Replies
8
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Closed
Let’s assume that I have an image, foo.psd, open in PSCS4. I softproof the image for a particular paper and printer. When I hit Ctrl-Y, the image is shown in softproof mode, and the softproofing info is appended to the image name in the PSCS4 window. Is there any way to save a copy of foo.psd with the soft proofing applied, i.e. foo-softproof.psd?

Reed

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RM
Raymond_McKinley
Jan 14, 2009
Reed

You cannot save the soft proofed info but you can convert the duplicate file to the printer profile. This will give you the same appearance as the soft proof, if your color management policies are set to preserve embedded profiles.

Raymond
B
BinaryFX
Jan 14, 2009
Reed, there is an option for this in the save as dialog box:

First, as Raymond suggests, dupe the image using Image/duplicate and setup the correct softproof view…then under File/Save As, check the box for "Use Proof Setup" (work on a dupe as this is converting the files numbers).

HTH,

Stephen Marsh
RM
Reed_Markley
Jan 15, 2009
Thanks Steve and Ray,

What I am trying to do is create an image that is not changed when I do a ctrl-Y to soft proof. Then I could overlay the untouchable image over the soft proofed, but changeable image, select the difference mode, and then adjust the color of the soft proofed image until the difference was black, indicating that both images were the same. I would then print the adjusted image and, in theory, it would look good, just like the original, before soft proofing, because it was totally color corrected to match the original.

Unfortunately, any image opened in photoshop, changes when you hit ctrl-y, whether it is a psd, pdf, or tif. I haven’t found a way to lock an image.
RM
Reed_Markley
Jan 15, 2009
What I would like to do, is somehow determine the inverse of the printer profile and apply it to the image to get the color correction. This image when printed would, in theory, resemble the uncorrected image on the properly calibrated monitor screen. Or am I totally missing something here.

Reed
RM
Raymond_McKinley
Jan 16, 2009
Reed

Iam not sure what your intention is, if you want to get the soft proof to better match the original image, then you can create a duplicate copy and use curves, hue/sat, channel mixer etc. to try and make the 2 images look as close as possible. Bear in mind that some colors just cant be printed, as they are outside the printers gamut.

Raymond
AR
Anthony.Ralph
Jan 16, 2009
As any variances between soft proof and non-soft proof will be similar for any image, once a curves setting has been arrived at which adjusts the soft proof image to match the non soft proof image, the settings can be saved as a pre-set and applied whenever another image needs to be printed using the same print parameters.

Anthony.
RM
Reed_Markley
Jan 16, 2009
Hi all,

What I am really trying to do is come up with some mechanistic and hopefully automatic way to look at the original image as seen on the monitor, and the image with soft proofing applied via Ctrl-y as seen on the monitor, and determine the RGB or LAB or whatever difference between the 2 images on a pixel by pixel basis to create a correction image, that when applied to the original image will result in the softproofed version of the image with this correction image applied looking, on the print, like the original image looked on the monitor screen. I am trying to take the man out of the color correction loop for soft proofing. I am trying to automate it. Obviously this approach would need to be done on an image by image, printer by printer, and paper by paper basis.

The other approach would be a color mapping approach, where all RGB colors would be mapped to a new soft proofed color. However, this would be computationally intensive since there are 16 million colors at the 8 bit level, and a few more at the 16 bit level. One would need to look at each pixel and correct it to the new color. this approach should be image insensitive, but would be paper and printer sensitive.

Am I seeking the impossible?

Reed
GH
Gernot_Hoffmann
Jan 17, 2009
Reed,

a print looks often different to the monitor. Quite
normal – many monitor colors cannot be printed.
They are out-of gamut for the printing CMYK space.
The RGB image data are converted via the RGB profile
to Lab, which is large enough to represent real world
photos without loss.
From Lab the data are converted to CMYK via the CMYK
profile. Here is loss because of the smaller gamut.

The colors have to be mapped from the larger RGB gamut
into the smaller CMYK gamut. This can be done

a) automatically by Rendering Intent Relative Colorimetric: in-gamut colors are not changed. Out-of-gamut colors
are mapped to the gamut boundary; this process isn’t
accurately defined by standards.

b) automatically by Rendering Intent Perceptual:
all colors – even those which were in-gamut – are
shifted towards the gray axis. This process depends
very much on the scientist or programmer and is nowhere
defined by standards.

So far one doesn’t need human interaction, but the results are not always pleasing. The third and optimal method is

c) image based gamut compression. Reduce the saturation
and eventually rotate the hue in regions which are out-
of-gamut until Photoshop’s Proof Color Gamut Warning
doesn’t show larger out-of-gamut gamut areas.

Gamut compression algorithms and the color science behind are explained in this excellent book:
Jan Morovic (accents omitted)
Color Gamut Mapping
John Wiley & Sons, 2008

Image based gamut compression is demonstrated here by many examples (but it’s called ‘Editing in Lab’):
<http://www.fho-emden.de/~hoffmann/labproof15092008.pdf> Attention: 3.4 MBytes.

IMO you’re seeking the impossible (if I’m understanding
you correctly).

Best regards –Gernot Hoffmann

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