Hi:
I will try to answer your questions as I understand them. If a more knowledgeable forum member sees anything incorrect, please correct me.
Let’s start with an analogy: even if you don’t realize, when you do something, you do a lot of things one after another, and RT mostly works the same way. Let’s say you are looking at an object, your eyes are capturing light, that your retina transforms into electrical signals, and then your brain interprets all of it into something that you understand. Finally, you tell someone else what you have just seen. There are quite a few transformations there, one from retina to neurons, another in the brain (interpreting the neurons signals), and another from brain to mouth. Any raw processing software works the same way.
You can take a look at this printer profile thread, but the point now is:
- you have an image and you need RT to know how to work with it: you have to tell RT how that image was encoded (how it was transformed from real life colors to pixels colors), and you do that by setting the appropriate input profile in the Color Management tool
- then RT works with that image internally using the working profile (it’s better if it’s a wide enough color space, like ProPhoto, although I personally use REC2020)
- finally you wish an image after all the processing done in RT, and you have to tell RT which profile it has to use to re-encode the resulting image: you do that with the output profile. To show the image in a website, it’s recommended sRGB. If it has to be sent to print it, I guess it should be a color space wider than that of the printer profile, or you won’t be using the full capabilities of the printer (so you would usually set the same output profile as the working profile)
- in the middle of this, to process the image, you need to see onscreen what RT is doing, so the program keeps converting the image in its internal working profile to an image encoded using your display profile, that then is sent to your monitor (keep in mind that this process is just for you to see the current state of the image onscreen, but the image itself is not modified internally)
Now it’s good that you read the explanation in RawPedia about Soft-Proofing, and then play a bit with these buttons present in the lower side of the Editor window:
(hover them and read the tooltip to get some useful info)
And just to give an answer in advance: you set the printer profile in preferences to see how the image would look after printing, but only if you click the appropriate button (the middle one in the previous screenshot), not to export the image with that profile (unless the print service tells you to do so).