Colour accuracy

SoftProofing

Oil and water bubbles over pink, yellow and blue, with stacked green rings

Get the best impression possible of how your colours will turn out on paper.

Keep in mind that monitors can reproduce billions of colours and even the most advanced printers have a narrower colour gamut.

A desktop monitor glowing yellow on a desk

Highly recommended

Calibrate your monitor

It is ideal to have a professional IPS monitor to be able to achieve colour accuracy and consistency when editing your images and preparing your files for printing. To calibrate your monitor, you can choose to invite a professional, or to invest in a monitor calibrator (e.g. X-Rite i1Studio).

A calibrated IPS monitor will show the colours as close as possible to how they will be printed out.

The macOS Finder Go menu leading to the ColorSync Profiles folder

Install

ICC print profiles

ICC profiles contain information about how the colours of a specific printer will look like on a specific paper. This way you can see how your image will turn out on a certain printer-paper combination. Read more

To install the ICC profiles, please copy the .icc files to the following directories:

macOS
Finder ➔ Go ➔ Computer
Macintosh HD/Library/ColorSync/Profiles

Windows 10
C:/Windows/system32/spool/drivers/color

Download ICC profiles

The Photoshop Customize Proof Condition window

Soft proofing in Photoshop

Previewing your image

In order to use the ICC profile of your choice in Photoshop, click View ➔ Proof Setup ➔ Custom. This opens the Customize Proof Condition window where you can choose the desired ICC profile to simulate the colours of your future print.

In this window, please untick Preserve RGB Numbers, tick Black Point Compensation and choose the Rendering Intent. You can read about Rendering Intents in the next section.

The rendering intent menu in the Customize Proof Condition window

Choosing

Rendering intents

There are only two rendering intents that are useful for Fine Art proof printing:

Perceptual

will benefit transitions and gradients
can cause the image to lighten or de-saturate

Relative Colorimetric

will provide with more exact tones
can cause banding of your transitions and gradients

The last step

Save your changes to print

When you are happy with the result of your soft proofing, please convert the file to the ICC profile of your choice. In Photoshop, click Edit ➔ Convert to Profile. Finally, save your file.

When we receive this file we will be able to see which printer and paper combination you chose as we can read this information on the converted file.