InDesign for QuarkXPress Users [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Soft-Proofing Colors

In QuarkXPress, you may have used the Display Simulation popup menu in the Color Management Settings dialog box to simulate different output conditions using your monitor. InDesign has the same capability, called

soft-proofing . (Alternatively, hard-proofing is proofing on hard copy output.) InDesign makes soft-proofing a feature of the View menu, which is unlike XPress but once again like its Adobe brethren Photoshop and Illustrator. Under the InDesign View menu you'll find the Proof Colors and Proof Setup commands. Here's how they correspond to XPress's soft-proofing features.

First of all, there isn't a direct InDesign equivalent to the XPress's Monitor Color Space option. Whenever Enable Color Management in InDesign's Color Settings dialog box is turned on, colors are adjusted to the monitor color space.

The Proof Colors command is similar to turning on XPress's Display Simulation option and selecting Composite Output or Separation Output in the Display Simulation popup menu. Selecting InDesign's Proof Colors command adds a check mark to indicate that soft-proofing is on. So what exactly is it proofing? The answer is whatever's checked in the Proof Setup submenu. You'll see three options there:

• Custom. Opens a dialog box where you can select any profile to proof. In XPress, you can soft-proof only the profiles selected in the Composite Output and Separation Output popup menus. If you wanted to see what the output might look like on other media, you would have to change those menu selections, and then remember to change them back before the job goes out. InDesign's Custom submenu lets you simulate how the document's current color settings might look on any medium for which you have a profile, without having to alter your workflow's actual composite or separation profile settings. This is also the place to simulate output to RGB devices like inkjets and other composite printers. We generally recommend that you leave the Paper White and Ink Black options on to properly simulate the selected profile's dynamic range. As in XPress, color contrast may appear to drop when simulating print media on a monitor, because the simulation must represent the limitations of the output medium.




• Document CMYK. This proofs using the document profile, which is set using the Assign Profiles command in the Edit menu. There's no reason why you can't choose the document's CMYK profile in the Custom command, but this command and the next one are convenient shortcuts. If you haven't changed the document profile to be different from the working space, you don't need to worry about this command.




• Working CMYK. This proofs using the Working Space you set in the Color Settings command.

For best results when soft-proofing, select High Quality Display from the View menu or from the context menu. This mode, along with soft-proofing itself, takes longer and uses more RAM, so for fast production work you may want to leave proofing off and the display set to a lower quality level.