Help needed understanding soft-proofing

divamum

Firstly, as always please feel free to point me to an existing thread , FAQ or helpfile that I"ve missed. I have searched, but so far either haven't stumbled on the right search-string, or simply don't know enough about my subject to ask the question in a way which pulls up the info I need

I did some shots for friends. They want to order a bunch of prints through SM which is great, bt I want to make sure that the prints are correctly processed to print appropriately, which I gather is how (and why) one "soft proofs". I have not done this before, and so am pretty much clueless as to how the procedure works.

Can anybody walk me through this (or, as previously stated, point me to somewhere which does?). I'm not even sure which print service I'm set up to use (to misquote Morticia Addams... I've never done this before)

Thank you!

ETA: Here's the gallery in question.

divamum

divamum wrote:

Firstly, as always please feel free to point me to an existing thread , FAQ or helpfile that I"ve missed. I have searched, but so far either haven't stumbled on the right search-string, or simply don't know enough about my subject to ask the question in a way which pulls up the info I need

I did some shots for friends. They want to order a bunch of prints through SM which is great, bt I want to make sure that the prints are correctly processed to print appropriately, which I gather is how (and why) one "soft proofs". I have not done this before, and so am pretty much clueless as to how the procedure works.

Can anybody walk me through this (or, as previously stated, point me to somewhere which does?). I'm not even sure which print service I'm set up to use (to misquote Morticia Addams... I've never done this before)

Thank you!

ETA: Here's the gallery in question.

Ok, one step further on - I found the ICC profile/softproof tutorial. HOWEVER... the ICC profile linked therein doesn't appear to be for Vista, and although I have saved it to my hard drive, it doesn't seem to be installing the profile (nothing happens when I click the "Install profile" command, and it doesn't show up in CS3 from the pulldown). Help?

CynthiaM

divamum wrote:

Ok, one step further on - I found the ICC profile/softproof tutorial. HOWEVER... the ICC profile linked therein doesn't appear to be for Vista, and although I have saved it to my hard drive, it doesn't seem to be installing the profile (nothing happens when I click the "Install profile" command, and it doesn't show up in CS3 from the pulldown). Help?

Where did you dump the file? Usually if you right click the file there is an option that says something like Install profile and then it will put it where it belongs in the Windows OS. Being on Vista should not matter. Also, if Photoshop is open when you right click and install the profile, it won't show up in the View>Proof Setup>Custom drop down menu until you close and re-open Photoshop.

Another good tutorial for soft-proofing is:
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/soft-proofing.shtml

Hope that helps.