Like most of us, I began photography many years ago by simply pointing my camera at scenes that I found interesting. I ended up with some nice pictures, sometimes. But, more often than not, the prints that came back from the lab didn't translate what I had seen. I found photography to be laced with disappointment.
Persevering, though, I made my way to photography's first truth: the camera does not record light the same ways our eyes do.
Fast forward many years and I now fully appreciate that a good photographer can look at a scene and instantly know how their gear will translate it. They understand how different film stocks render, how different sensors have varying strengths, how color will or won't be imitated, how a scene might flare through a given lens and how that flare might or might not be useful, how that red flower or that blue dress will map to a tone of gray when shooting black and white, how that red filter will shift those tonal relationships, how a large aperture will capture a very different scene than a small aperture, and on and on.
Photography is a narrowing process, taking the inherently wide gamut of human vision and pushing it through the limiting confines of sensor and electronic processing (or emulsion and chemistry) and optics. What results is a smaller gamut version of what we saw with our eyes.
What distinguishes every serious photographer in the world from the multitudes wielding their ubiquitous cell phone cameras is their knowledge of those limitations, of that narrowing process. Every good photographer I've ever known can predict how an image will be rendered, by whatever equipment they have at hand, long before they press the shutter.
Printmaking is a further narrowing, into an even smaller gamut.
A master printmaker in the darkroom didn't print by rote. When they chose a particular paper, or a particular contrast, when they dodged this, or burned that, when they decided to leave a print in the enlarger for an extra fifteen seconds, they didn't do it blindly. They did it because of a particular look they sought. They did it knowingly, predicting the result they would achieve.
We, most of us, seek the same thing in digital printing. We make changes in our editing software knowingly, fully expecting - predicting - how those changes will be rendered on paper. Soft proofing with ICC-managed profiles, done properly - which is to say with the requisite knowledge, process, and equipment - allows us to pre-visualize what we're trying to achieve, then provides a straightforward path to doing so.
Which isn't to say there aren't black-box approaches that don't provide good results. But just as I don't know any great photographers who don't pre-visualize the images they are making, I don't know any master printmakers who throw darts at the wall, hoping for a nice print.
