Adobe Lightroom offers excellent colour management features to help you achieve more colour-accurate and satisfying inkjet prints. Of course, to make this possible, you'll need good print profiles (and good papers too). Details of our profiling service and our full range of Permajet inkjet media can be found here.
Permajet has a wide range of fine art papers as well as icc profiles for its papers that have been improved over the years. The profiles can be downloaded free of charge at your website.
Soft-proofing
Firstly, Lightroom allows you to use a print profile from within the Reveal, not from the function Print. After you have edited the image as you wish it to appear on the screen, you can use the Test preview to get an idea and check how it will print. You will need a well calibrated and profiled monitor to get the most out of this feature.
Test preview is a way how an image will be reproduced before printing. You will have the opportunity to see how the colour changes before using paper and ink. The only thing you have to do is to go to the menu View y On-screen tests, Show proof, checkbox, or tick the checkbox for On-screen tests below the image, or simply press the “s” key. You can select sRGB, Adobe RGB, default installed profiles, or load a print ICC profile.
Lightroom will convert it from its working colour space to the profile you have chosen and from there on to the monitor profile, rather than directing it directly from the working colour space to the monitor. This allows the image on the screen to simulate the print. You can choose between rendering perceptual y relative colorimetric (depending on the source profile, the destination profile and the image itself). The check box Simulate paper and ink mimics both the colour of the paper and the tonal range of the printer profile. If the colours change more than you want them to, you can click on Create Proof Copy which generates another version of the image that can be edited while you can still view the screen test, but you have to keep in mind that you will still be limited by the colour range of the target profile.
Adobe Lightroom's print function also allows you to use a print profile. You can scroll through the different options on the right hand side of the screen and you will find the colour management section. The default option is the printer manages the colours (which rarely produces acceptable results), but you can also click on the menu to change the option to the print profile of the paper you use that will allow Lightroom to control the colour. If you don't see the profile you want in the menu, select other, which allows you to choose the print profiles you want to have in the menu.
You will get options for the representations crelative odorimetry o perceptual. A representation is the way in which colours are converted from one profile to another. Sometimes the perceptual gives better detail of highlights and shadows than the relative, and can also retain more colour variation and detail. While perceptual Relative, will print those colours within the printer gamut more accurately. Colours outside the printer gamut will be aligned to the nearest coordinate within the gamut of the target profile, while those inside will remain unchanged.
The choice you make depends very much on the image and print profile in question. For example, you will tend to see more difference between two reproduction proofs on matte papers. You can find more about reproduction proofs here.
You can also make quick brightness and contrast edits in the colour management section while printing, but it is generally better to follow the soft-printing procedure for more rigorous results.
Our complete range of Permajet papers can be found at here.