Soft proofing and the gamut warning in Paint by Zaweba

Before a picture goes to a printer, it helps to see roughly how it will come out. Soft proofing does that on screen. In Paint by Zaweba it lives in the View menu: Proof Setup picks what to simulate, Proof Colours (Ctrl+Alt+Y) turns the simulation on and off, and Gamut Warning (Ctrl+Shift+Y) shows which colours fall outside what the destination can reproduce.

Nothing here changes your pixels. It changes only the view, so you can switch it on, look, adjust and switch it off again freely.

Setting up a proof

Proof Setup lets you simulate a CMYK or RGB profile. For a print job, choose the profile your printer gave you for their press and paper. For a screen job, you might choose sRGB to see how a wide gamut image will look on a typical display. Then press Ctrl+Alt+Y and the canvas shows the picture as it would appear on that output.

Expect the proof to look a little flatter than your original. Paper reflects light rather than emitting it, so deep saturated blues and bright greens often lose punch. That is not a fault in the editor. It is the honest preview you wanted, and it is far cheaper to see it now than on a box of prints.

Reading the gamut warning

Gamut Warning paints out-of-gamut colours grey. Those are the areas the destination can't reproduce, so they will be shifted to the nearest colour it can manage. A small speckle of grey in a bright flower is usually fine. A large grey patch across a sky or a product colour is worth attention.

To bring colours back in gamut, use a hue and saturation adjustment on the affected area, lowering saturation gently or nudging hue, and watch the grey shrink. Doing this with the proof on means you are judging the change on the output you care about.

Simulating plates and colour vision

Proof Setup also simulates individual C, M, Y or K plates, or the CMY plates together. That is a quick way to see how much of an image relies on black ink, or to check that a rich black is built the way you expect.

It can also simulate protanopia, deuteranopia, tritanopia and achromatopsia, which are forms of colour blindness. This is valuable for infographics, maps, charts and interface graphics. If two important colours become indistinguishable in one of these views, people with that kind of vision can't tell them apart either. Changing lightness as well as hue is usually the fix.

The Soft Proof adjustment layer

Alongside the View menu, Paint by Zaweba offers a Soft Proof adjustment layer. Because it sits in the layer stack, you can make edits beneath it and see their proofed result as you go and hide it when you want the original. Remember to hide it before exporting, since as a layer it will affect the output.

A routine that works

Edit normally first. When you are close, choose the proof profile, switch on Proof Colours and Gamut Warning, and fix the areas that matter. Turn them off and check the picture still looks good in its own right. Then convert or export as the job needs.

The point of soft proofing is fewer surprises. With these tools built into a free offline editor, you can check print and accessibility before anything leaves your computer.