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+--- Thread: The Rough Guide to Soft Proofing (/Thread-The-Rough-Guide-to-Soft-Proofing)
The Rough Guide to Soft Proofing - rich2005 - 06-03-2021
...and why you should not worry about it.
You know that your printer uses cyan, magenta, yellow (CMY) and black (K) inks and wonder about converting between the GIMP (and computer) red, green, blue (RGB) and CMYK.
If printing at home, the inkjet printer software does the conversion. Just remember that photographs are typically displayed brighter on the computer, especially with Windows Photo Viewers and will print that bit dimmer.
If sending photographs off to a commercial printer, these days they will generally make the conversion for you, with a warning that colours will become 'more subdued'. They will still do a better job than you can do.
LOGO's and designs that are printed using offset printing where layers of colour are printed on top of each other (a subtractive printing process) are another matter. Your painting / sticker / book cover might come back looking dull and faded.
The best way is to create your design start-to-finish using a CMYK editor such as Krita, however it is possible to use GIMP and see what a print will look like. That is soft-proofing
If you must use Gimp, then pick your colours carefully avoiding those bright greens and blues that will be affected the most.
This little video is about soft-proofing in GIMP. https://youtu.be/jyNz7-QLPLA about 6 minutes duration.
For those that want a CMYK version of their work using Gimp then there is a plugin CYAN see: https://www.gimp-forum.net/Thread-CMYK-color-mode-Gimp-2-10?pid=11743#pid11743