Has soft proofing finally come of age? In the past few months, the technology has rarely left the pre-press news pages. There have been major announcements from printers and publishers alike about their adoption of soft or remote proofing for not just content, but colour. As we all know, colour is key, and if we're talking about content, then soft proofing has been around since the advent of email. "Content proofing is pretty universal now from PDFs whacked all around the place," says Paul Sherfield of The Missing Horse Consultancy. "But viewing them correctly in colour is a whole different ball game."

Therein lies the rub. Soft proofing for colour - in many aspects the holy grail of printing - is a concept that could, and indeed should, revolutionise the industry. And not just for the big publishers, like Bauer Consumer Media and BBC Magazines, or the big magazine printers, such as the UK's Polestar, St Ives and Wyndeham and the US's RR Donnelley and Quebecor World, but for every small and medium-sized printer with the will to implement it.

However, according to Eric Nunn, of Poem Colour Consultancy, the question of whether or not soft proofing has come of age is misleading. "The real answer to that question is that it is colour management that is coming of age," he says. "The issue isn't so much the adoption of soft proofing as the adoption of colour management."

Certainly, in order for a printer to successfully soft proof for colour they must have a thorough knowledge of colour management, have a colour-managed workflow and be printing to an ISO standard printing condition from 12647/2, all of which might sound expensive. However, according to Sherfield, getting a handle on your colour is actually relatively cheap.

"Smaller companies are worried by their lack of knowledge in this area and the perceived costs involved in training and implementation," says Sherfield. He claims that, for a smaller printer, a colour management consultation - including a colour audit, training in ICC colour management, implementation of a colour-managed desktop-based workflow and ISO 12647/2 process control calibration for one multi-colour press - costs from around £1,800.

The perceived high cost to printers of soft proofing results from the high-end products on the market, often aimed at large multi-site printers, which tend to dominate the headlines. The likes of Dalim Dialogue, ICS Remote Director, Kodak Virtual Matchprint and CGS Oris Soft Proof are highly capable systems geared towards, among other things, the efficient and accurate press-side display of the print-ready file. These, and others, have been the systems of choice for magazine publishers and printers who have inevitably been the first to show an interest in soft proofing.

This early adoption from the magazine sector stems from the fact that they generate by far the most hard-copy proofs and therefore stand to save the most money from eliminating costly hard proofs from the print production process. ICS Remote Director hit the news in April when Quebecor World revealed that it had signed a three-year contract covering its North American pre-media and print sites.

Low-cost solutions
Meanwhile, Dalim Dialogue has been used by Bauer Consumer Media as the basis for a colour-managed workflow that uses soft proofing throughout, thereby resulting in a massive amount of repro work coming back in-house without the need to employ any specialist repro operators.

"The issue for printers is the access to and efficient display of paginated data," says Nunn. "[But] the cost of these solutions is making the adoption of press-side proofing untenable in the current economic climate."

Sherfield agrees that these high-end systems, while ideal for magazine printers and publishers, are too expensive for ordinary commercial printers who have simpler requirements. "If you're on a huge 64pp web with maybe four colour desks then that's where these more bespoke modules come into their own, because they will take the actual imposed file and make it very easy to navigate around in ribbons, but they are hugely expensive," he says. "Per colour desk on a web offset press you could be talking anything up to £25,000."

However, there is a much cheaper solution comprising nothing more expensive than a quality calibrated display and Adobe Acrobat. "For general commercial printers, running four- or eight-page presses, as long as their client has a colour-managed screen and is working to their colour management policy, then if the printer sends them a PDF/X-1a they can open it in Acrobat and it will automatically be colour-managed to the right colour space," explains Sherfield.

Similarly, if the printer wants press-side soft proofing to give the minders something to match to for clients that don't want to pay for hard-copy proofs, a calibrated high-end monitor, which can cost from as little as £800, coupled with Acrobat, will do the job. Calibration hardware and software comes in at an additional £125, meaning the total package can cost under £1,000.

The problem is that, in order for SMEs to benefit from soft proofing, they must have a full understanding of colour management, which according to Nunn, is something of a rarity. "It is a fact that colour management is still a smoke and mirrors subject for most printers," he says. "For any system to work there has to be a realisation that printing presses, just like cameras, scanners, monitors and proofing devices, need to be calibrated if the output from them is going to be predictable"

Once this is achieved, then the whole concept of ‘running to proof' becomes very different, no matter if that is a hard- or soft-copy proof. "If the proof is a proper simulation of the target gamut and characterisation, then there should be far less need to run to match - you just run and it will match," adds Nunn. "Printing is about the mass production of a concept that has been pre-defined. With colour management, we can have full, meaningful colour communication, wherever and on whatever platform - soft or hard-copy proof."

Clued up about colour
Although soft proofing has definitely started picking up momentum, the SME market is still in the early days of adoption. As such, there will be a definite advantage for printers that understand and properly implement colour management, regardless of whether their clients have a clue about what they're doing or not. All the buyers care about is whether their job is printed well, and with reliable and consistent colour reproduction, that should be a doddle.

"Printers that understand colour management will deliver consistent results from the correct input data, and will very quickly tell if that input data is incorrect," explains Nunn. "That can and should be done before a job gets anywhere near a press. In fact, correction of input data to conform to target conditions is becoming easier to achieve and will become routine."

However, while the early adopters will benefit from reduced costs and increased customer retention through effective management of client expectations, once the adoption of soft proofing/colour management becomes widespread there is a risk that it will further commoditise commercial print. If all printers with the relevant kit can construct pages that conform to every aspect that the target printing condition demands, while containing the preferred colour appearance, then accurate printing ceases to be a differentiator, thereby further increasing the emphasis on price - the last thing any printer would want.