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[What's New in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4]
[Julieanne Kost - Senior Digital Imaging Evangelist] Hi, and welcome!
My name is Julieanne Kost, and now we're going to take a look at what is probably the most requested feature in Lightroom 4.
And that is soft proofing.
Now, don't get me wrong. Soft proofing is not for everyone.
Some of you may never use soft proofing at all. You might be perfectly happy.
You've calibrated your monitor, and you're sending off your high volume of images
to your lab or to your printer or posting them to the web, and they look just fine.
But, for some folks, what soft proofing allows them to do
is it allows them to take control of how colors that are out of gamut
get pushed into a smaller color gamut, perhaps like SRGB for the web,
or into the smaller gamut of a printer.
Now, soft proofing is available in the develop module,
and the way that you toggle it on and off is by tapping the S key, that's the keyboard shortcut.
Or down here in the toolbar, you can turn on and off soft proofing by just checking the option.
And the first thing that you'll notice is when you enable soft proofing,
the background area changes that surrounds your image.
Now, if you don't like the brightness value of that, you can always right mouse click and change that,
but we set it by default to paper white.
And just in case you didn't know, if I tap the S key again to get out of soft proofing,
the background tone there, you can also change that by right mouse clicking.
Of course, on the Mac, that would be your control click.
All right, let's go ahead and toggle back on soft proofing.
Now, when you go into soft proofing, first of all, we have a little warning up here that says "Proof preview."
And you'll also notice that in the histogram, we have changed the values that appear underneath the histogram
when you move your cursor into the image area.
So as soon as I position my cursor over this kind of yellowy building,
you'll notice that I'm getting specific R, G, and B values, numeric values.
See, if I'm not in soft proofing - and I'll tap the S key here -
If I'm not in soft proofing, what I'm geting are percentages.
The reason that we can give you the numeric values when we go into soft proofing
is because you have told Lightroom what your profile is going to be.
Basically you've told Lightroom your destination.
In this case, I've got it set to SRGB, but obviously we can change that.
And we will change that in a minute to a printer profile.
So, the thing with soft proofing is that soft proofing allows you to really customize
the way your colors are converted for a specific output device.
So, probably you don't want to make changes to your original, right?
You've adjusted your original, and it looks good,
and you might want this original to go out to, like, 5 different devices.
So you probably don't want to change your original.
In which case, I would select Create Proof Copy.
So you can click on this little button here,
or when you actually go to make a change, if soft proofing is enabled, Lightroom will ask you if you want to make a proof copy.
What is a proof copy? Really, it's a virtual copy.
And since you probably already know what a virtual copy is, you can see down here, we've just made this virtual copy.
So, here's my original, and here is my virtual copy,
specific for my output device, which I have selected as SRGB.
The only difference is going to be if we go to the library module,
a proof copy has the name of the profile listed right here under the copy name.
All right, other than that, your proof copy is the exact same as a regular virtual copy.
All right, so now that I've got my profile selected, and we'll go with SRGB right now.
SRGB is actually the setting that you want to use if you are soft proofing your images for the book module,
if you're going to export these files to Blurb, just so that you know.
So I've picked my profile, I'm in my proof copy, and I would like to see which of the colors are out of gamut.
In order to do that, I can turn on either my monitor gamut, which is this icon in the upper left of the histogram,
or I can toggle on the destination gamut, which would be more appropriate here for my SRGB profile.
Once that's toggled on, we can see all of those colors that are out of gamut because they're highlighted,
or they have a red overlay on top of them.
Now, it's up to me to figure out how I want to bring those colors that are out of gamut into gamut.
And there's a variety of different ways you can do that in Lightroom.
For example, we could just go the basic panel and pull down the saturation of the vibrants,
but honestly, that's going to pull down all of the saturation or all of the vibrants for all of the colors.
Here I have the opportunity to do a selective adjustment, so I might as well take advantage of that.
and I would that probably the easiest way would be using HSL.
So we've got hue saturation and luminosity, I'm going to click on saturation,
grab my targeted adjustment tool, and then I could click to drag down to decrease the saturation
in a specific color range that needs to go from the large color space to the small color space.
So that would be one way to do it, but maybe you don't want to desaturate that nice blue.
Let's undo that by using command or control-Z.
And the other way you might be able to do this is to actually go to hue.
Maybe slightly changing the hue will enable the color to be printed.
So let's click and drag up and see if that will actually change, and it does.
So this tells me that that cyan color is going to be difficult to reproduce in SRGB,
but if I move that cyan color to more of kind of a blue-purple color,
then I would be able to convert this in this specific manner to SRGB,
and I would know, basically, that what I see on the monitor is what I'm going to get.
So, that's great for SRGB.
Let's take a look at what would happen if I'm going to a different profile, maybe a printer.
I'll use command-Z again to undo that shift,
and this time we'll change our profile to something like maybe a glossy paper.
Well, look at that. How nice.
When I'm printing to a glossy paper, everything I see right now on my monitor
is completely within the gamut of what that printer can print,
and that doesn't really surprise me because right now, the inkjet printers out there are getting really, really good,
and when you print to a glossy paper, they've got, you know, 6 or 8 colors they can print with.
That's a pretty large gamut,
but if I go ahead and change this again down to a very, very limited color gamut,
in this case, I'm choosing the velvet fine art paper, you'll notice now there are different colors that cannot be printed.
In SRGB, I couldn't print the blue, but now, printing to this velvet fine art paper,
it's really kind of the reds and oranges that are going to be my problematic colors.
So, again, I could trying shifting the hue,
or I could just scoot over to saturation and click and drag down to desaturate just those reds and yellows,
and I'm leaving those blues as they are because I know those can be printed to the velvet fine art paper.
Now, obviously the velvet fine art paper is probably, like, the worst case scenario, right,
because it's the most absorbent paper.
It's not a coated paper, so it's really hard to get the same saturation as you would get with,
like a premium luster or a glossy paper.
The other thing that I can do, if there's just small areas of color that are out of gamut and I want to desaturate those,
instead of desaturating the entire color range here in the HSL settings,
I can switch over to my adjustment brush,
and we can load the adjustment brush with a negative saturation.
We can simply paint over those areas.
Now, I think I have the flow of the brush down a little bit,
so let's just increase that so I can do this a little bit more quickly.
But you can see how I can paint over the areas that are out of gamut
and bring those colors back into gamut in a much more kind of selective manner than
decreasing the saturation of the entire color range by using the HSL sliders.
Well, this is kind of the first half of soft proofing.
The second half of soft proofing you can find in the print module.
Here we've got in the print job area, a print adjustment option.
Now what is this for? One of the big requests that we've had,
and one of the big surprises that people come across when they're printing is,
you know, all their images look great on the monitor, but when they print them, they just look dull.
They look either a little bit just flat or maybe they just look a little bit too dull, too dark.
So, what you can do is you can use these 2 options,
the brightness and contrast options, in the print module to apply an increase in brightness
or an increase in contrast on the fly on output.
Now, the thing is that these print adjustments are very similar to, like, the print sharpening.
They get applied during the conversion to the printer,
so you're not actually going to see a preview of the adjustments that you make down here.
So it's going to take a little bit of experimentation, but I think that, you know,
pretty quickly after you print 4 or 5 prints, you'll get a good feeling
for how much brightness or how much contrast you want to add on the fly when you print your images.
One last thing that I did forget to mention when we were in the develop module,
you'll notice that these profiles here, these profiles were installed with my printer.
They came with my printer.
And in fact, if we go down here to Other, you can see that I can select
from a huge variety of profiles that came with the printer that I have,
but obviously you can also make your own custom profiles and there's a variety of manufacturers.
I have the X-Rite I1 for making profiles, but Datacolor also has the Spyder.
And then when you create your own custom profile for your specific printer,
you can then load those profiles here and then check the ones that you want to use.
The ones that are checked when you click OK then appear in this short dropdown.
So it's really nice that I don't have to look at all the profiles, just those profiles that I use.
Excellent! That wraps up this tutorial on soft proofing in Lightroom 4.
My name is Julieanne Kost. Thanks for watching.