Lightroom: Add Soft Proofing

Check out soft proofing in Lightroom 4:

http://feedback.photoshop.com/photosh...

Its been mentioned in many forums for a long time. So yes, its probably one of the most requested features I’ve seen over the years. But doing it correctly isn’t easy. LR has to improve soft proofing we have in Photoshop, deal with doing so parametrically, give us good before and after results etc. Not easy but doable and I really hope and expect to see it in 4.0.

Yeah... sorry, I meant specific to this Facebook Feedback forum. In any case, I'm curious to know more specifics of what you'd improve from Photoshop soft-proofing if it were implemented in LR?

Well for one, I’d want a true before and after preview whereby I could turn on the soft proof and apply output specific edits parametrically, and see the ‘before’ image without the soft proof on as I produce these edits. The edits would be output profile specific. So I’d like something akin to virtual copies where I could build output specific edits based on each soft proof. It be great too if I could copy and paste the edits onto other images I want to print. It be cool to see on-screen, a soft proof with say Perceptual and Relative Colorimetric side by side to make the decision as to what to use easier.

Ahhh. I see what you're saying. Yes, that would be much better than PS and an excellent way to implement it. I've always been curious though... it seems like if the program is capable of displaying the results of applying a profile during soft proofing, couldn't it also calculate the necessary adjustments to bring the virtual copy you suggested in line with the original... or as close as possible ex-gamut issues etc? Since that's what i end up doing during soft proofing, an "Auto-adjust based XXX profile" option would also be a time saver.

I agree to adding the feature to a point ...

Andrew points out the crux of the matter ... Soft proofing is quite often one of the most requested features to be added to Lr ... and looks to be one of the most difficult features to implement ... if done well ...

I for one am willing to wait until it can be done properly, accurately ... and most important added in a manner that won't tax hardware once implemented ... a daunting task for the developers indeed ...

Hi,

There is, as a plugin at http://www.lightroom-plugins.com .

(Full disclosure: I'm the author!)

Cheers,
Jim

BenD (or anybody else) - You could do the community a service by trying Jim's plugin and reporting back: Does this plugin do the job? should Adobe do the same thing only make it native? Or is this plugin so good that the need has really been filled so Adobe shouldn't bother? Or is this plugin sorely inadequate, and what Adobe really needs to do is...

Summary:
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When user has an FR/Idea, and another user informs of existing plugin solution, it would be good if *somebody* comes back and says: "good enough", or "yeah, but that don't really cut it...".

Adobe may make Jim's Soft Proofing plugin obsolete come Lr4 but it would be nice to know how good of a solution it is in the mean time.

I would like this facility in Lightroom

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled
Soft proofing.

Yes, this is a great time for Adobe to re-imagine how soft proofing could ideally work. When you think about all the different modules and the different proofing needs within each (sRGB in Web, Print profiles in Print, etc) it's clear that an elegant implementation is going to take time to think though. I am also willing to wait until it can be done really well.

That being said, I feel like I've already waited a long time. :-] High hopes for LR4.

Having used Lightroom 3 for now about 6 weeks I wish to make the following suggestions to the Adobe programmers.
A MUST HAVE = an undo button
A MUST HAVE = real time soft proofing for output so that as an image is developed you know what it will look like in the print / web browser / other media
A GOOD IDEA = to be able to choose and save an ICC profile for each image individually. This would greatly enhance soft proofing. Adobe assumes that just one good ICC profile is suitable for all types of photograph which is of course very far from the truth.

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled
Some basic and not so basic ideas for Lightroom.

I would prefer to have basic soft proofing capability now rather than an improvement on PS capabilities sometime in the future. Perhaps the PS approach could be implemented for now? For something that's "probably one of the most requested features I’ve seen over the years" I think that would go a long way.

BTW, I'm new to this forum and it's nice to see the civil and constructive tone.

Soft Proofing is here; http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/li...

Here is another soft proof video:
http://digitaldog.net/files/LR4_softp...

Very exciting new tool that trumps soft proof in Photoshop big time (way to go LR team).

In terms of seeing the out of gamut (OOG) colors with the overlay, useful to some degree but I don’t think it is at all necessary to alter the image using HSL or other tools manually. Why? Because if you have a large gamut original and you are converting to say sRGB for the web, the conversion to sRGB will convert the data using the profile and hand this for you. Same with output to a printer. And with good profiles that take advantage of a Perceptual table, the non OOG colors may also be adjusted to attempt to honor the relationship to all colors. So it is useful to see the overlay to pick an output color space but to spend time adjusting the document to remove the overlay is I think a lot of work that is unnecessary. Gamut clipping is just a fact of life. Now if after conversion, you see something you really don’t like, and I find that very rare, by all means, try selective tools. I just don’t think you’ll find this necessary 9 times out of 10.