soft proof vs preview before printing

[ocean76]

Hi to you all,

I have been struggling to get a good printout of my photos but this is really very hard to achieve.
Pls tell me what is it that I do wrong.

I am using cs5.
my printer is canon pixma mg 6250

here is the way I follow:
1) I am using redriver paper.com's printer papers.(to do that I have downloaded the icc printer profiles for my pixma mg6220 and then installed these profiles.)

2) before going to the printer dialog in cs5, I first soft proof my image to see if there's a gamut warning or not.
and to do that I select the paper I will use under "device to stimulate" and chose "relative colorimetric" and "black point compensation"..As soon as I see that there's no gamut warning I go to the printer dialog.
3)in the printer dialog I choose:
a)photoshop manages colors.
b)I disable printer's color management.
c) printer profile setting: I choose the paper I want it to be printed. (ex: redriver ultraprosatin for canon)
d) I chose "relative colorimetric" and "black point compensation"
e) I set the Media Setting: Photo Paper Plus Semi-gloss and Quality to Level 2 (these are the recommendations from redreiverpaper.com for ultra pro satin paper typr that I use.
f) check the "preview before printing" option

4) and finally I press the print button.

before the printing starts, I see the preview of the image and this is where I have problems.
a)on this preview, the colors of the image are totally different than the original file (when I first open the file from the file menu)
b) this preview colors are also different than the soft proofed colors. (I will send the printscreen image in a couple of hours and there you can see the color difference between the preview form and the soft proofed form)
I cant understand the reason.
shouldnt this preview colors totally match the soft proof colors?
(if not why do we soft proof.)
and in my experience, when I finish printing the image , I see that the colors on the paper are very close to the "preview" colors but not to the colors of the soft proof.

I can't find out what I am doing wrong and in the while I spend lots of paper and ink.
So pls tell me what my mistake is.

one more thing to add:
my monitor is samsung sync master and I can not say it is calibrated but
1) I have done some basic monitor calibration with the help of a samsung calibration software which came with the monitor..so I can say that a basic calibration exists on my monitgor but not a professional one.
2) when I take my photos to a lab, they print them wihout any color adjustments and they are perfect, exactly the way I see them when I open at cs5.

so which is the exact match of the final output, the preview before printing view or soft proofed view?

thank you in advance
Melih

[Polar01]

Ocean76, a question is there another screen that come up if you hit "print setting" on the screen shot that you have posted. If so I would like to see it and the settings that you used. With mine there is one screen for soft prood, and two for print, what you have here is a Meatloaf "Two out of Three", need to see the third one.

Cheers:

Allan

PS Welcome to CIC, would help to be able to call you something other than Ocean76, you can got into profile and add your name, also can help to know where you are.

[Manfred M]

Softproofing is an emulation, using the icc profile for your printer (ink) / paper combination of what the final print will look like under appropriate lighting conditions. Don't forget that what you see on your screen using a high gamut,calibrated monitor (from what I can tell your current monitor meets neither of these two conditions) has a much higher dynamic range than your printer / paper combination does.

In printing, your paper base sets how white is shown; i.e. no ink is deposited in areas that are pure white, so the tint of your paper is what shows through.

I duplicate my image and have a window of the actual image beside the softproof and then add appropriate adjustment layers to the softproof version and play with my curves, levels and he & saturation to get the image as close as possible to the original before printing. I then print the updated softproofed image and label the adjustment layers appropriately so I know why they are there.

This also explains why your preview shows what it does; shows the original image you are printing and does not bring the printer / paper icc profile into play.