Softproofing
See the job on screen before it is on the press.
Softproofing opens a production PDF inside CC Capture and shows it in colour you can trust - through the ICC profile of the printing condition you are actually going to run, on a display you have calibrated.
What it does for you
A soft proof that is merely "a PDF on a screen" is worse than no proof: it looks convincing and it is wrong. This one is colour-managed end to end, and it is honest about spot colours - the named inks a packaging job lives or dies by. If a spot ink cannot be reproduced, it says so rather than quietly showing you something close.
The result is that questions which normally wait for the press - will this green hold, does the overprint go muddy, is the black text neutral - can be answered at a desk, before plates.
What you can do
- Open PDFs from disk or straight from cloud storage
- Render through any ICC profile you hold, including n-colour (CMYK+OGV) profiles for extended-gamut work
- Spot colour handling: separations are rendered from the ink's own Lab values, not approximated from CMYK
- Measure proof colour: put an instrument on the screen and compare what the display shows against the aim - per patch, with Delta E00
- Ink-coverage and separation views, one plate at a time
- Barcode and pharmacode checking on the artwork
- Compare two files, or two versions of one file
Getting started
Enable Softproofing in the Plugin Manager and its icon appears in the toolbar. Calibrate your display first - a soft proof is only as good as the screen showing it - and point the plugin at the ICC profile of the printing condition in Softproofing -> Settings.
You will need: a calibrated display, and the ICC profile for the printing condition. A measuring instrument is needed only for Measure proof colour.
Part of ChromaChecker CC Capture. Plugins are enabled in Plugins -> Plugin Manager. This page describes the plugin as of CC Capture 4.0.570.
