So we've done quite a bit of work to this image to get it looking nice. And it's going to be wonderful to print it out and hang it up on the wall. You can see here, the original fall right there, and the pumped up fall in Lightroom here. So, before I go ahead and print this image, there's a few things that I just need to be sure about. Because a very common situation for people printing from Lightroom around a range of other software for that matter, is your prints end up too dark. So why are the prints too dark?

It's a very simple reason, it's because your monitor is too bright. So the bare minimum you can do is turn the brightness down on your monitor, because if it's on 100%, you are creating such a rich luminous image, there is no printer in the world that can reproduce that. So you need to turn your monitor brightness down to around 50% to give a better indication of how it's going to print. I'd say 50% for a relatively new monitor, probably a little bit higher for if it's more than two years old, maybe 60% or so. But ultimately, it's a little bit rubbery does fingers way if you want super accuracy, what you're even better doing is calibrating your monitor. So that is purchasing a calibration device such as the the x, right, I want all the data color spider, and using that device to accurately calibrate your monitor, that's really where you need to be for precision.

So turning down, the brightness will be a big help, but calibration will be a lot more accurate. So once you've calibrated your screen, there's one more feature that Lightroom offers to give you even greater. Accuracy or simulation is what's called soft proofing. So down here on the toolbar, if I click soft proofing, what Lightroom does is it attempts to simulate a output profile. So if I look up here in my soft proofing dialog, you'll see by default, it's simulating sRGB. So the standard monitor space.

If I was on a wide gamut monitor, then simulating sRGB would show me what the image is going to look like on screen to the majority of the people in the world with standard monitors. But if I had a good printing profile, I can also simulate that. And if I look in here, I can see I've got a bunch of profiles. I've got some standard Epson scan profiles here for the semi matte paper, and I've also got a custom Epson 9600 profile here for the cancer and protein paper. So very high quality printing conditions right there. And I'm just going to turn that on and Lightroom is going to attempt to give me a better simulation of what this image will look like on that particular printer.

Now I've got another option here if I click simulate paper and ink and it's going to try even harder to cross render my screen preview with my output profile. And you can see hopefully, when I turn that on the image, the image dulls down even further, it loses a little bit of that loop. And I'll study even more, but it's giving me a very accurate simulation of what this image is going to look like in print. So if you haven't done monitor calibration, then soft proofing is probably a waste of time because it's not going to be accurate. But if you've gone to the trouble, to at least turn your brightness down, but much preferably calibrate your screen, then you're going to be able to do some very good cross profile simulations here. So providing a you've calibrated your monitor, and B, you've got the correct output profile to simulate Lightroom gives you some wonderful power here in soft proofing.

There's one more little feature here called the intent the rendering intent. There's two different rendering intensity can simulate this perceptual, and there's relative perceptual and relative. So without getting too deep into the technicalities of what these rendering intents do, suffice to say perceptual is generally the preference for an image with more rich, highly saturated colors. So if you've got lots of rich intense colors, then perceptual is a better choice. Whereas if there's less saturated colors then often the relative colorimetric is a better choice. So this but if you want super precision then by all means, have a look at each choose which you prefer and do a few tests.

So I very sophisticated feature there the soft proofing, trying to simulate a range of different output conditions, providing you've got the correct profiles.