Has Proofing Gone ‘Soft’?

pP: What is the difference between soft proofing and remote proofing?

Summers—We think of soft proofing as a scenario where you’ve got a monitor on your desktop. The designer is preparing a concept, a comp, or a final page at some point during the creative process, and they use that monitor to do a couple of things: to check physical size of things or the accuracy of placement. They also may go down several levels to verifying that the package on the screen or in print is the right color. And as soon as you branch into that area in terms of validation of what’s on the monitor, you go from the monitor as display to the monitor as proof. Whether it’s remote or not is a matter of who is using that monitor and where. If the monitor is in front of the designer, and the designer is creating and getting the feedback from the monitor, I wouldn’t consider that remote. However, if that monitor is being echoed and displayed at the consumer product company upstream, that is a remote proofing application.