I soft proof my photos prior to printing (View/Proof Setup) and haven’t been checking the gamut warning because I assumed the soft proof took away the colors that are out of gamut. Now I discover that this is not necessarily so. Could somebody educated me about the soft proof. If colors can still be out of gamut, what is the purpose of the soft proof? What are the limitations of the soft proof? Thanks.
Soft Proof is meant to emulate the effect that printing will have on the final print using that combination of paper, ink and printer. It has absolutely nothing to do with gamut warning.
The purpose of soft proof is to allow you to make the necessary corrections to your image in order for your print to achieve the exact look you want on paper. These corrections include, for instance, a curve to increase brightness and boost contrast a bit.
Gamut warning is pretty much self explanatory. It tells you which color ranges will be clipped, so you can decide whether to bring them back in range or not, i.e. allow them to be clipped.
Highly recommended reading: "Real World Adobe Photoshop" by David Blatner and Bruce Fraser. The relevant chapters on this subject are valid since the Photoshop 7 edition of that book.
I had the impression since PS7 that, soft proofing an RGB file with any one of my press output CMYK profiles did indeed "flatten" or "compress" the file to within the gamut of those press/ink/stock conditions.
In other words, I’ve been laboring under the idea that I could check whether an image is within gamut in one of two ways: 1) Turn on the gamut warning directly; or 2) Soft proof the image with my destination profile.
Ah yes. What I meant was, in the smaller (I assume you mean soft proof-activated) profile, the same colors that gamut warning highlights do undergo a visible shift (some subtle, some dramatic) to the compressed profile, right?
In other words, toggling on and off the soft proof should visibly change the exact same image areas that gamut warning highlights, yes?
Yes, thanks Ramón. I was aware that neither gamut warning nor soft proof actually mess with pixels. Sloppy language on my part.
And your last statement makes sense: Some OOG pixels may shift so subtly when soft proof is active as to be invisible on screen. Gamut warning will make them shout at you.
So I guess I wasn’t so far off; just missing a subtlety.
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