Thanks in advance for taking the time to read & reply this posting.
I have a color calibrated monitor and have been encountering difficulties obtaining a good match between screen and prints from online printshops. When using the soft-proof & gamut warning tools (using the printshop's ICC profiles) there is a marked decrease in saturation, vibrance, etc; and depending on the image, lots of gamut warning.
However, if I convert the image to the printshop's ICC profile there is not the same onscreen quality loss (using relative colormetric + black point comp). Further, if I convert back to aRGB and soft proof again, there is no image degragation and/or clipping.
I understand why there is no clipping upon re-softproofing, however, I do not understand why the onscreen representation of a softproof is so different from a convert to profile.
As such, I was wondering what the best workflow would be when prepping files for an online printshop...
1. softproof and adjust to get the final output (difficult and time consuming); or
2. convert to prinshop ICC profile and upload (Pictopia), or convert to printshop ICC and reconvert back to sRGB before upload (mPix).