Question

Softproofing "Before:" settings

Forum|Forum|4 months ago
January 20, 2026
1 reply
155 views

When in LrC Develop module, Soft Proofing, there is a setting on the Toolbar for "before:". The first three choices are "Before State", "Current State", and "Original Photo". These are to set the view shown in the "Before" panel. I see no difference between "Before State" and "Original Photo", and "Current State" seems to identical to "Proof Preview". I have searched Adobe LrC documentation and find nothing about this, and very little about soft proofing in general. Where can I find documentation about this?

Windows

Conrad_C

Community Expert

I'm not sure where it’s explained properly, but this is the situation: Before/After and Soft Proofing are two different and unrelated features, so using one does not directly affect the other. Although you could use both features at the same time.

Before/After is about the undo states in the History panel. By default the first state is Import (how the image looked immediately after importing it). If you have made any edits, the most recent edit state is at the top, and is normally the selected (current) state. So typically, Before/After compares the most recent History state (After) to the first History state (Before). But of course if you select an intermediate state in the list, then that becomes the Current (After) state.

Soft-proofing toggles between the full range original, and a simulated preview of how tones and colors will be limited by the (printer/ink/paper) Profile and Intent set in the Soft Proofing panel. You toggle Soft Proofing on and off using the Soft Proofing checkbox in the toolbar, or the command View > Soft Proofing / Soft Proof, or just pressing the S key.

You can see in the picture below that each feature uses its own separate controls in different areas of the workspace. I showed the contextual menu over the History panel to show how you can right-click any History state to make that one the Before state. This means you can compare any two History states as the Before and After states.

Lightroom-Classic-before-after-vs-soft-proofing.jpg

DClark064Author

Thanks for your reply. I am aware of the use for doing before/after comparisons in the History.

I am trying to unravel how to use this when soft proofing. The issue arises when I create multiple master files using copies of the same RAW file and then want to soft proof the master files to print versions of the file. Unfortunately all the soft proof files have the same name. How to keep track of which soft proof copy goes with which copy of the RAW file? How to be sure when soft proofing the "Before" is the right one? I find that selecting "Original Photo" goes back to the RAW file from which the various copies were made, so that is a problem. It is easy to get the Soft Proof Copies paired with the wrong processed master copy. If Adobe had included the Copy number in the name of the soft proof this would mot be a problem, but they did not. I have work arounds so I can keep them properly organized but I was hoping there was some Adobe documentation that would help. As per usual, Adobe documentation is lacking, or hard to find.

Conrad_C

Community Expert

Unfortunately all the soft proof files have the same name. How to keep track of which soft proof copy goes with which copy of the RAW file?
By @DClark064

I hope this isn’t telling you something you already know, but are you taking full advantage of the Copy Name display options for Loupe view and the expanded cells in Grid view? This is what I show in the demo below:

If the Metadata panel is set to “EXIF and IPTC”, both File Name and Copy Name are shown at the same time. (Adobe should have labeled Copy Name as “Virtual Copy Name” to be clearer that the field is really about the name of the virtual copy.)

A proof copy is actually just a virtual copy that includes soft proof settings. If the virtual copy was created using the command Photo > Create Virtual Copy the default Copy Name is “Copy x”, but if it was created while Soft Proofing is enabled then the Copy Name is set to the name of the ICC profile and Intent that are applied. In the demo you see me go from image to image and viewing the Copy Name field of each image…and note that the File Name is also visible further up, so you can see both at the same time.

The next thing I do is select the last image, click in the Copy Name field, and enter “Exhibition X version B”. This is to show that you can always edit the Copy Name to fit whatever purpose you want, like to label different soft proofing solutions that you’re testing.

Then I open Library View Options and in Expanded Cell Extras, I click the pop-up menu for the top right corner of an expanded cell, and I choose Copy Name. That makes the Copy Name appear in the top right corner of every cell. The File Name is already in the top left corner, so now I can clearly see both the File Name and Copy Name of the selected image even when the Metadata panel is out of view.

The last thing I show is going into Loupe view, and again customizing the view options. In Library View Options, I set one of the Loupe Info options to File Name and Copy Name. Now I can also see both of those simultaneously, and in very large letters at the top, when in in Loupe view.

So, to put it all together: If you set up the metadata displays so that you see both the File Name and Copy Name together whenever possible, and you also make sure that the Copy Name of every proof copy you make is appropriately named, you should always be able to know if you are looking at the correct file or virtual/proof copy, and which original the selected copy is based on.

Lightroom Classic Copy Name grid loupe.gif

How to be sure when soft proofing the "Before" is the right one? I find that selecting "Original Photo" goes back to the RAW file from which the various copies were made, so that is a problem.
By @DClark064

Well, it looks like you brought up something I didn’t know about before, which is that Before/After adds a menu when in Soft Proof view. (I thought Before/After was only about the History panel, but apparently I was wrong about that.) I too can’t find where this menu is documented by Adobe, but I did find some explanations on page 471 of the excellent book Adobe Lightroom Classic: The Missing FAQ by Victoria Bampton. I have the PDF version so I can search it quickly. The following descriptions are my own, based on that.

Before state: The History state that’s set as the Before image. By default it’s the first (bottom) one, but it could be a state in the middle if you used Copy History Settings to Before as I showed earlier.

Current state: The History state that’s currently selected. Typically people leave this on the most recent edit they did, in other words the last (top) History state, but if you want to see if earlier edits were better, you can select a different state.

Original photo: The source file that the proof copies are derived from. Soft-proofing is not applied to this view so that you can compare the soft-proof preview of the proof copy to the full range original.

It looks to me like the items below the last line of that menu are any other proof copies tied to the same original file.

So I think the way you want to use this most of the time is to, in Soft Proof view, leave the Before/After menu set to Current State. That will show the current edits of the selected virtual copy on the left, and on the right will be the Proof Preview of that to compare to.

Lightroom-Classic-Soft-Proofing-Before-After.jpg

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