recently I've had a few questions about how to do soft proofing in affinity
photo so today I'm going to take a look at how to do it using this photo I shot
recently know the photos been adjusted and I've applied all my editing to it so
it's ready now to be sent to the printer the problem is I don't know how this
will look and that's where the process of soft proofing comes in now to soft
proofing affinity photo you need to add a soft proofing layer and you'll find
that under the adjustments and here we've got the different soft proofs
available so I'm just going to click on the default and you immediately have
seen some changes to the image now what the soft proofing layer is doing is it's
causing the image on-screen to be represented as if it was a print on your
printer and that includes allowing for things like ink and paper no the first
thing that I want to do is pick a paper profile so I've got a lot of profiles
installed on my computer and in the soft proofing window you can see a lot of
these different ones now the one I want to use is a fotospeed paper so let's
pick to start with this natural soft texture paper now when I print that you
can see that the screen changes so now the screen is representing what the
print would look like when printed on that paper and you'll notice that
there's not a lot of black in there it's much more lighter now and the reason for
that is this is a matte paper it can't reproduce really dark blacks now in this
image there are actually a lot of dark colors so if we wanted to reproduce this
more accurately what we could do is change our paper to one that could
represent a wider range of tones and that maybe is a smooth pearl paper or
even the Platinum baryta paper now at this point and need to explain something
called color gamut now when we edit an image we have a color space and if you
look at this image it's actually been edited in
Adobe RGB color space which is quite wide the papers that we're using here
probably can't display all the colors that are possible in the Adobe RGB color
space now that Adobe RGB color space it has a range of colors that it can
represent and if a color goes outside of that range it's referred to as being out
of gamut because this platinum baryta paper probably has a different color
range to the color space we've edited in it means the colors could go outside of
what could be reproduced on that paper and those colors are then referred to as
being out of gamut and you've got a little box down here that allows you to
do a gamut check let's that tick that and see what happens now immediately you
can see a lot of gray has appeared and what's happening here is that affinity
is representing as grey pixels the areas that it can't reproduce on the chosen
paper so what will happen is that the printer and the computer will make some
adjustments to those areas you see in gray to allow them to be printed so
let's turn that off for the moment and you can see that the areas that were
gray are the very dark areas and that's because the black that can get
reproduced on a print either always lighter than you would have on a
computer screen so it will never look quite the same now what happens if a
color is out of gamut well that depends on something called the rendering intent
here the default is absolute colormetric but there are other rendering
intent we've got perceptual relative saturation
as well if you used to printing in something like Lightroom you'll probably
recognize perceptual and relative let's have a look at perceptual now you notice
there that the image suddenly became lighter what's happening when we choose
the perceptual rendering intent is that affinity takes all the colors in the
Adobe RGB color space for this image and it tries to compress them down into the
color gamut or range of colors that the Platinum baryta paper here that we've
picked can represent if I choose another paper you'll see
because that's got an even narrower color range it makes it look even
lighter now let's have a look at what happens with a relative colorimetric the
image looks slightly darker and slightly more as we may intend it to and actually
that may be good enough to print what's happening when we pick relative
colorimetric is that the computer is identifying those colors that are out of
gamut and is assigning them to the closest in gamut color so what you get
is that there's less lightening of the image because this is a dark image
instead only the areas that fell out of gamut are being adjusted if we go to
saturation what the image is trying to do here also what the computer is trying
to do here is preserve the saturation and brightness in the colors and because
of that it's looking a little bit like the perceptual rendering intent now the
rendering intent that tends to preserve the color accuracy best is this absolute
color metric and immediately you can see this no looks like the original image to
some degree if I go to my layers panel I'll turn off the soft proof and you can
see there's actually very little difference so if I print this image as
it is now without the soft proof that's how it
will look in the print if I use the plus symbol right to paper if I check the
check the gamut check though you can see that some of the tones are out of gamut
and what might happen is that those will look a little bit too too dark in our
print and they'll just be pure black so what we can do is we can add an
adjustment to our image to compensate in those areas so that the printer can
handle them a little bit better so let's have a look at how we do that and the
first thing I want to point out is that this soft proofing layer should always
go on the very top of your layer stack and that's because if you add
adjustments over the top of it they won't be properly reproduced as a soft
proof so let's now pick this layer my adjustment one just
a soft proof and we can add a curves adjustment to this now before I go any
further I just want to go back to my soft proof and I want to see the gamma
check and now using the curves I can actually take the black point here
because that's one of the problem areas and increase it and you can see that
very few areas never falling out of gamma I can know though because the
image is looking a little bit light drag the curve down and there we've just
affected the areas that we want it to just because of the the Danning problem
so let's go back and turn off the gamma check
and you can see now there's more detail in the shadow areas than the ones
previously now the other thing that often causes problems is saturation so
let's know again click the next layer down below the soft proof and we'll add
the HSL adjustment I'll just use a default it may be that reducing the
saturation gets rid of the gamut problems and it does to some degree but
I don't want to lose a lot of saturation so I may still be getting a problem with
the luminosity in those areas so I can just increase very slightly by
lightening the image across the the entire tonal range it seems to have
reduced the problems with out of gamut colors and that may allow me to actually
increase some of my saturation and I'm going to actually pick the Reds here and
just boost my saturation there and I can also if I want to change the hue of my
Reds to make them maybe a little bit redder so I'm quite happy with how
that's now looking so let's just go back to the layers let's go back to the soft
proof and we'll take our gamut check off and now what I've got is an image that
if I print it and it looks like this I've actually been quite pleased with it
so I'm going to know turn off the soft proof and there's not too much
difference now one of the things that got to remember to do is the
three layers really are all together as one and they all to do with printing if
I turn off that group of layers that's my original print which I can't
reproduce because my printer inks don't have a large enough dynamic range but
that's how it would look and actually that's not too bad at all maybe we could
increase the contrast just a little bit by using the curves adjustment here and
that doesn't look too bad at all now that's my soft proof complete the thing
to remember when you come to actually print this though is remove the soft
proof actual adjustment here because it is an adjustment it will affect the
output and you don't need it to because what we've got here with this HSL curves
layer and all the other adjustments is something that will reproduce the image
in a way that I like on the print and because this law layer or this group of
layers is only to do with the print I'm going to turn it off until I come to
actually print when I want to print I'll turn it on and I'll send this image as
it is to the printer so that is how color gamuts work rendering the intense
work and soft proofing work in affinity photo I hope you found that useful I'm
Robin Whalley you've been watching Lenscraft I'll see you next week for
another video