Luminous Landscape Forum
Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Colour Management => Topic started by: noritsue_me on August 06, 2026, 07:04:02 pm
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I used the soft proofing feature to test my custom icc profiles against an image I was planning on printing. The paper being Red River's Ultra Pro Satin and the printer, Epson P20000.
I was surprised by the amount of colors being highlighted as out of gamut. I then changed it to display the custom icc profile made for my Epson 7890. It showed that none of the colors were out of gamut. This was also surprising, since I figured the P20000 would have a similar, if not larger color gamut than the Epson 7890. I made both profiles using my Xrite ipro2, using 4,000 patches (with the help of an automated scanning table) and used identical settings.
So I figured maybe I messed something up at some point when making the icc profile for the P2000. So, I reprinted the color charts and made a new icc profile, making sure to be extra careful this time and when I soft proofed the same image using my new profile, even more colors were out of gamut.
Now, from what I understand, I should take the soft proofing gamut warning with a grain of salt as it doesn't differentiate between colors super far of gamut and colors minimally out of gamut. Nonetheless, I'm troubled by these results. I can't seem to make any sense of this. Is it my printer, my ipro 2, etc.
I'd appreciate any insight on this. Am I completely misunderstanding the soft proofing feature?
Jeremy
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Soft proofing is useful for making output-specific edits and picking a rendering intent; the out-of-gamut preview is rather useless and unnecessary. The whys are explained here:
http://digitaldog.net/files/SoftProofingInPhotoshopCC.mp4
Profiles have two tables, one for output, one for soft proofing, and they should be 'in sync,' but not all ICC profiles are created equally. So, a disconnect without even accounting for display calibration isn't unusual.
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Profiles have two tables, one for output, one for soft proofing, and they should be 'in sync,' but not all ICC profiles are created equally.
That really shouldn't be a thing. Far safer to soft proof using the actual tables ("test as you fly"), i.e. B2A to produce the printer output, then A2B to check what it is expected to look like. (None of the ArgyllCMS profiles have soft proof tables.)