Add soft proofing to Photolab


well no, not that I know – but yes, you can …

With printing … let’s say, you have textures with a highly saturated colour and want to print them onto a certain paper, that does not hold / cannot reproduce this saturated colour. You know, that you can reduce that colour’s saturation to some degree (and / or shift the colour) to keep these textures visible.

How to do that ‘best’? – Lightroom offers 2 rendering intents, perceptual and relative colorimetric.

  • When set to perceptual, all colours are compressed to fit into the printable colour range.
    You get a visually satisfying colour reproduction, but all colours are shifted to some degree, depending on how far out of gamut the highly satured colour had been …

  • When set to relative colorimetric, only the out of gamut colour is shifted
    and set to meet the next possible, the next printable colour in this case.
    You get a pleasing colour reproduction without colour shifting, except this out of gamut colour …

Most of the time, when I have to do colour range transformation, I use rending intent relative colorimetric for the very same reasons. But then, I also take care of possible out of gamut colours and choose the appropriate paper, if it doesn’t have to be a certain (matte) paper.

Best is to try yourself and see, how far you can go and how to control. :slight_smile:


Please, check these videos. They show you how to …
– with Tim Grey (printing starts about 56:00)

– with Robert Rodriguez jr (from the beginning)

have fun, Wolfgang