Has Proofing Gone ‘Soft’?

Harrell—Getting one monitor to look like another monitor and getting the output to look the same on two different inkjet proofers is a huge issue. At the same time, liability is the driving factor in much of what this industry does. Nobody wants to assume the liability for a print job gone wrong. So we’re approaching it in the same way by looking at the same file, not two copies of the same file. Spot colors, metallics and pearlescents, and translucent or clear materials, for example, present obstacles to soft proofing in a packaging environment because there’s virtually no way to represent them accurately onscreen. I think in a commercial environment where paper and CMYK and non-spot colors are the norms, soft proofing is a much more realistic and viable tool today than it is in packaging.