I can't help thinking there's something else going on here, but I can't quite put my finger on it. Highly intelligent people DO understand what soft-proofing does and have most likely used it, but still dismiss it.
They understand they need to calibrate their displays too. But some haven’t put the concept that
how you set your calibration targets affect the
prints are too dark issues or the lack of successful soft proofing. If you go back enough years, the lack of acceptance that one needs to calibration their display was high. Plus that required an expenditure of money. Soft proofing in Photoshop is free. This seems to be an educational issue, hence my confusion about why the educators are not making the connections.
What better an example than the primary developer of Lightroom back then, because he thought it low priority or no priority, maybe still does, and here we are three versions later still waiting for it despite the countless repeated requests to Adobe from the professional imaging community to get it in there
Well based on knowing a bit about the bkgnd here, the lack of soft proofing wasn’t due to a lack of acceptance of soft proofing being an effective tool. The reason we don’t yet have soft proofing in LR is due to far more complex issues. And I don’t believe we want LR to mimic the soft proofing we have in Photoshop which hasn’t seen much technological progress since 1998 but rather for the team to raise the bar several notches. Also, unlike Photoshop, if you have the soft proof in effect, and you want to edit the image, how do you effectively do this in a metadata editor? In Develop? In Print? Are these output specific edits kept separate from the non output specific edits? In Photoshop, you can build adjustment layers, then layer sets which allow you to name and control when such output specific edits are visible and applied. What provisions do we have in LR to do this and what would the ramifications be if you had a master with 6 different output device sets of edits? Do this with Virtual copies? IOW, there’s a lot more work in LR than just turning on a soft proof, picking a profile and a rendering intent.
While using Photoshop to round trip soft proofing/editing and printing in Photoshop is a bit of a kludge, it works for the time being.
We say it's MUCH better than the alternative of not using it, for all the good reasons we've discussed above. Sure Jeff, no harm encouraging Matt and Scott to sit in your session - but I think, behind the scenes, they should be encouraged to give their huge audiences the benefit of a balanced perspective on it.
Agreed on both counts. What will be interesting is the reactions of these two
students. Right now, the conversations from them go something like this:
We know it is useful for some users, its not useful for us, do whatever works best for you. What I find interesting is what appears to be a their lack of curiosity as to why so many vocal users praise soft proofing yet still dismissing it because its easier to make multiple prints. Or correctly calibrating their displays and correctly setting up the soft proof. Its like someone in the high end of Photoshop educational business saying “
I don’t use the pen tool, its too complicated and doesn’t work for me, the lasso tool does, therefore, if you want info on using the pen tool, go elsewhere”. They’d be off the hook to some degree if they pointed to another expert educator who could provide information about the pen tool. In this case, the message is,
soft proofing doesn’t work for us, if you like it great. If not, here’s the kludge to move forward. I find that attitude troubling.
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