Hi all -- this is a bit long, so please bear with me:).
I've been working on setting up a digital darkroom. I have a neutral gray 4x 4 foot table painted in Munsel 8 with "wings" to provide a viewing area, overhead Solux 4700 K track lighting about 6 feet above the table, a NEC 2690 monitor with spectraview software and XRite 94 colorimeter (currently calibrated to 120, D65 and gamma 2.2), and a HP B9180 printer. I blacken out the single window with a good blind. I use a 5D and a 40D and shoot raw with the cameras set to RGB (although I think that the in-camera RGB only affects the jpeg files when I shoot both raw and jpgs concurrently). I import into lightroom Beta 2 and also work with Photoshop CS3. I've been printing color 13x19 images, mostly to HP Professional Satin paper and also to Hahnemuhle Fine Art Smooth Paper using soft-proofing in CS3. I'm getting very good correspondence between the overall colors on the screen and print with the monitor calibrated to a luminance of 120 (also up to 140). I've also tried D50 but find the colors correspond better at D65. I use Prophoto as a workspace in CS3 and I understand that Lightroom uses Melissa RGB, which is very close to Prophoto.
Nevertheless, I find that I get a more exact correspondence between print and screen when I set the Color Settings in CS3 to "desaturate monitor colors" by 15 or 20 percent (and this is in the softproofing mode). I know that you're not supposed to do this when you soft proof, but I'm wondering if anyone else has had the same experience or can lend any insight? Could this just reflect the difference btw reflective light and the light from the monitor?
Another question. I bought a GretagMacbeth color chart and photographed it right on the table with the 4700 K Solux lighting. I then imported the raw file into CS3 with the white balance set to 4700 K. Both when I just leave it like that and when I click on one of the neutral gray squares to render the color balance exactly neutral (ie, equal RBG values for the gray square, which affects all the other colors too), I find that some of the colored squares correspond quite exactly (the monitor colors look exactly like the color chart colors) while others are substantially off. The same thing happens when I print out the image; some squares match very closely btw print and original and others are noticeably different.
Can anyone offer any insight or suggestions as to whether I should pursue all of this any further? I'm getting great prints, so perhaps worrying about this level of exactness is taking it too far? I'm especially interested in your opinion about the desaturation setting in Photoshop and whether any of you use this in conjunction with softproofing.
One other thing -- a technically oriented friend suggested that one of the reasons that Lightroom may not be incorporating soft proofing in version 2 is that the designers have basically finessed the issue by incorporating a sort of "under the radar" soft proofing within the very color system utilized by Lightroom. Does anyone here print straight from Lightroom even for their fine arts or important prints without using Photoshop's soft proofing?