Stacked EPIC radial profiles of 495 blank-sky pointings, sorted in bins of soft-proton contamination inFOV/outFOV. The black data points show observations with low SP contamination (inFOV/outFOV = 1–1.15), whereas the blue points comprise observations that were severely affected by SP contamination (inFOV/outFOV = 1.6–2.0). The left panel shows the stacked profiles obtained when subtracting only the QPB component, while in the right panel, the SP and QC components have been taken into account following Eq. (A.2).