Soft proofing and color management in BookWright

  • Updated

Are you obsessed with color management? We are, too!

We built a feature in BookWright that lets you soft proof your book to help predict any color shifts due to out of gamut colors. These are colors that are beyond the range that our print presses can reproduce, such as heavily saturated colors that will print in a more subdued, less saturated hue.

Soft proofing applies to images in your book and any background colors you have selected, and doesn't actually change the colors in your book. It simply displays the potential color shift that may occur in print.

How to soft proof in BookWright

  1. Open BookWright. If you're on a MAC, go to BookWright > Preferences. If you're on a Windows PC, go to Help > Preferences.
  2. Check the box next to Show Soft Proof, and click Apply. Once Show Soft Proof is applied, any out of gamut colors will display as the nearest printable color.
  3. If you haven't calibrated your monitor with a colorimeter then it may not accurately display the color. But even on an uncalibrated monitor you'll still be able to anticipate which colors are likely to shift when printed.

An example of a color shift

If you turn on soft proofing and choose a background color that is out of gamut like the bright pink below, it will appear less saturated on the page to better approximate the printed result.

Background color with soft proofing turned OFF:

sp_off.png

 

Background color (same color value) with soft proofing turned ON:

This approximates how this color will look once printed, since the bright pink color can't be reproduced on our presses. 

sp_on.png

 

How to soft proof in Photoshop

If you have access to Photoshop you can also follow the soft proofing steps found in our color management section, which makes use of Photoshop and Blurb's ICC profile. From the color management page, click on the tab for BookWright and follow those instructions.

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