Many people ask about soft-proofing in Lightroom. The simple answer: there isn’t any. At least not yet.
However, Lightroom is a color-managed application. So if your monitor is properly calibrated, you can trust what you see on screen – that is, until you need to preview the printed output for a specific printer/paper combination.
For this, you still need to go into Photoshop. My workflow:
1. Perfect the image as much as possible in Lightroom
2. Select the “Edit in photoshop CS3…” command from the Photo menu.
3. In Photoshop, perform sharpening, soft-proofing and make any necessary adjustments for print.
You can then either print the image from Photoshop or go back into Lightroom for printing.
Tip: when you’re done editing the file in Photoshop, make sure to use the Save… command and not Save As… This will update the linked file in the Lightroom database.