soft proofing?

[ehackett]

I've been using LR and a Canon i9900 to print occasionally over the past 3 or 4 years and am now trying to understand technical aspects a bit better so I can improve results and reliability.  Soft proofing seems to be very important, LR (and LR2) do not do it, I have read, so I am curious about two things:

How do I get a soft proof?  Only through CS2 or -3 and some output/reinput process?

What is the "print preview" image that pops up when using LR?  To my untrained eye it looks a lot like the print that the i9900 will make, and it often looks quite different from the image I had been working with, so it seems to be a translation of the working image into the color range of the printer/paper/profile.

Any guidance or reading on this topic will be most welcome.

Thanks and best wishes,

Ed

[digitaldog]

Currently soft proofing is done in Photoshop. This may help:
http://seminars.adobe.acrobat.com/p84783897/

[photograd]

Soft proofing allows you to preview how your image will look when printed with the printer and paper you plan on using.
To use this feature in photoshop you need to have a profile set up.
The profile is the combination of paper and printer.
You can set up your own profile or use profiles that come with your printer.

[ehackett]

Thanks for the guidance, folks!  What about my last question:  when using LR, if I use a profle and in the printer menu turn on preview before printing, the preview image often looks much like what eventually prints and sometimes different from the screen image.  Is this preview the same as or different from a soft proof?  

Thanks again and best wishes,

Ed