Has Proofing Gone ‘Soft’?

Harrell—Anytime you promote collaboration in any capacity, you’re empowering the customer to help you make decisions about their job. That builds trust.

pP: When all is said and done, however, doesn’t every soft proof wind up in hard copy somewhere?

Ranasinha—I would agree that for a lot of packaging work a hard copy proof would be the ultimate result of the soft proofing process, but I would also contend that there is a small but growing percentage of jobs that lend themselves to having the only proof being a soft proof—depending on the job in question. If the reason for proofing is purely for content and if that is the issue, it’s far more efficient to use a soft proofing method than a hard proofing method—even if you just think about the time factor savings and the ability to have multiple proofs sent to a number of project participants all at the same time, and allow them to respond and approve all at the same time. Soft proofing systems allow you to set up a certain level of approval hierarchy, you know, participant number one gets to approve before participant number two.