well, i just took some photos with blue sky and as soon as i soft proof with whatever profile, the nice cyanish bluish sky turns to some pale magenta-blue. anything i do to try and compensate turns the faint vaporuous clouds into patches of blown out cyan and bands.
If different printer profiles give you more or less the same pale-magenta-blue, then this is most likely a result of the source color blue not quite fitting your monitor gamut. Photoshop will apply channel clipping which unfortunately shifts the hue. The original color may well be pale-magenta-blue, and changing this in the source space simply produces more artifacts in the monitor preview.
Does softproofing to your printer profile show the pale-magenta-blue color? Or is it only visible in actual print? In the former case, simply correct the color while previewing in softproof mode.
in fact, i don't mean to hi-jack, but this might tie in with what i'm wondering? i'm wondering if any of the pro's here (who go to print)
a) quickly soft-proof before editing any images because it's your output that you are trying to make look good
b ) make an image look "killer" on your monitor and then try to match with a soft-proof copy
It is both: first you make the image "look" as good as possible in its source space. Unfortunately you only have your monitor preview to guide you, but setting white-balance, black-point, levels and contrast should preferably be done as early in the process as possible, using the source space or working space of choice.
Note that if you set most of this in ACR, a lot of this processing is done on the source data and during the conversion to your working space.
Then when preparing for a print or for the web, you can best use the softproofing feature to adjust for potential degradation. (preferably on a copy or using layers, of course).