Soft proofing to display profiles not working

[Derek21827936kt9i]

I'm on Lightroom 14.4 on Windows 11. I have a calibrated wide gamut QD-OLED display. I made a v2 ICC profile in CalMan, and have this set as my current display profile.

I grade an extremely saturated image that I know is well outside of sRGB gamut. I want to see how it looks in sRGB. When I enable soft proofing and pick sRGB I can enable the "show destination gamut warning" and indeed the whole image is outside of sRGB. Cool. But... Lightroom doesn't simulate it. I toggle between soft proof enabled and disabled and there's no difference.

Bringing this into Photoshop and soft proofing for sRGB looks as expected. Significant desaturation when it's enabled.

In Lightroom I can only get the simulation if I pick a printer profile and enable "Simulate paper and ink" in soft proofing. 

Am I doing something wrong? I want to grade in the full gamut of my display (for future proofing) and then use soft proofs to trim the image down to sRGB or P3 as needed for export. Why does this work in Photoshop and not Lightroom? Is this just... not a thing?

[Ian Lyons · Accepted solution]

Softproofing in Lightroom Classic is for prints. I don't believe it was ever intended for softproofing displays.

https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/help/develop-module-options.html#:~:text=Soft%2Dproofing%2....

[Derek21827936kt9i]

Thanks so much for your response! What's the suggested way to do what I want to accomplish?

[johnrellis]

Hmm, when I soft-proof to sRGB on my calibrated, wide-gamut Eizo display, I definitely see sRGB being emulated. For example, in the attached screen recording, see how the red and purple flowers in the center and right edges get desaturated. Focus on the flowers to minimize the distraction of the background changing from grey to white.

(You have to view this video in a player and on a screen capable of displaying Rec.2020 video.  It displays on my Mac OS 15.5 Eizo display with the Quicktime player. While it shows the effect, it's not as obvious as on my display. I have no idea what other combinations of OS and player work. I had to record it with an Iphone 14 in HDR video mode, since Mac OS screen recording always records in the narrow Rec.709.)

While I agree that the primary intent of soft proofing is to simulate prints, I think it can also be used for simulating any output color space/device. The authoritative book Lightroom Classic: The Missing FAQ says:

"Even if you only ever show your photos on a screen—perhaps on the web—soft proofing can show how your photos will look when exported to the smaller sRGB color space. Colors that are within Lightroom’s working space may clip when converting to sRGB, for example, highly saturated reds become much less colorful when exported as sRGB. Soft proofing allows you to preview that effect and compensate if needed."

You wrote, "Bringing this into Photoshop and soft proofing for sRGB looks as expected. Significant desaturation when it's enabled".  If you open the raw file in Photoshop proper (not Camera Raw), preserving a wide color space (e.g. Prophoto), does the image look identical in Photoshop as in Develop without soft-proofing?  If it doesn't, that points to a problem.

[Derek21827936kt9i]

Interesting! Yeah I see what you're talking about. That doesn't happen for me. You're on macOS though, so this could be a Windows specific issue, or maybe a driver thing. I'll have to mess with it a bit.

I'll test out what you mentioned. My previous test was an export to 16 bit ProPhoto TIFF and then opening that in Photoshop

[johnrellis]

"My previous test was an export to 16 bit ProPhoto TIFF and then opening that in Photoshop"

As long as you exported that in a wide color space, e.g. Prophoto, in Photoshop it should look nearly identical to the raw in LR Develop. Does it?

[Conrad_C]

I tried a couple of tests. I was able to see a difference in both Lightroom Classic and Photoshop. This is on the wide-gamut, HDR-capable display on my MacBook Pro. The source file is an RGB angle gradient in a Photoshop document set up in ProPhoto RGB. To ensure that colors are going to clip in sRGB; the three R, G, B gradient color stops are all set to 255 (maximum saturation) in ProPhoto RGB.

This is an animation of switching sRGB soft-proofing on and off simultaneously in Photoshop (left) and Lightroom Classic (right), where the screen shots were arranged side by side in a wide gamut P3 Photoshop document. The difference between soft proofing off and on is hard to see in this looping GIF animation reduced to the 256 color GIF palette, but if you open the animation in its own tab/window to see it larger and watch the color transitions closely, you can hopefully see that there is a difference between soft proof on/off in both applications and it’s a similar difference. Yes, the difference is more obvious in the original screen capture.

I also enabled the gamut warning in both applications, and it returns about the same area. The Photoshop gamut warning color is set to gray, in Lightroom Classic it’s the default red.

This doesn’t help explain or answer why it isn’t working on Derek21827936kt9i’s computer, I was only trying to find out if I could see it working on my configuration.