Understanding Soft Proofing

The holy grail of digital printing is to be able to get the image that you print to appear as close as possible to what your screen displays. The first ingredient in this quest is to ensure that your screen is properly profiled. This was once a mysterious and expensive prospect, but now most experienced photographers understand that they need to buy a colorimeter for a hundred dollars or so, and profile their screen on a regular basis.
Of course the second step is to print using accurate profiles. These may be available from your printer or paper maker. Preferably you should have custom profiles made foryourprinter,yourpaper andyourinks. Unless you frequently switch papers this isn't terribly expensive to have done. There are quite a few services online that will do this for you. The best profiles though are likely ones that you make yourself, but this requires spending at least $1,000 and involves the purchase of a spectrophotometer and accompanying software. For anyone using differe...