One of the key feature requests from my last post, and from just about anywhere serious Lightroom users congregate is soft-proofing. Many people feel strongly that Lightroom can't be considered a serious workflow solution unless soft-proofing is part of the printing process. Note that I say solution as Lightroom is obviously a good tool for RAW conversion, image management, and web output even without printing. But, since the final step for many of us is printing, unless you're comfortable doing it from Lightroom it's hard to call it a complete solution.

Here's the rub for me though. While I think soft-proofing is an important piece of the printing workflow, doing it half way is worse in my mind than not doing it at all. Let's take a look at the easy scenario to implement. In the print module, when Managed By Application is selected, and a profile chosen, the image display panel could show the soft-proof. This would certainly be better than nothing, but unless the Print module is also modified, you still need to jump back to Develop to make changes. And, if this is the case, do you show everything at that point with the selected profile? Personally, that would throw me off.

The other issue is that part of soft-proofing for me is gamut warning. Now we're talking about adding a potentially major feature, and once again when and where is it used? I don't think bouncing from Print to Develop and back is a great solution, but the way Lightroom is designed it would be difficult at best to implement this any other way.

To be honest, I still find myself going to Photoshop for critical printing and any time I need to soft-proof. But, I also have a very good feeling for how an image is going to print on a particular paper and printer combination that comes with hundreds of hours of printing. And, when it comes to something as important to me and to a paying client as accurate prints, I want it all - not just partially. How about you?