Power extraction from a high‐power soliton fiber ring laser containing a chirped fiber grating is investigated with a variable output coupler. Comparisons are made between the intracavity pulse and the rejection port output pulse. It is shown that a good design for extracting high quality pulses at high power is to insert an intracavity filter to suppress spectral sideband generation and to take the output from the rejection port. The results should apply in general to soliton fiber lasers. Gain saturation is shown to be the main mechanism in the laser that compensates for changes in cavity loss. ©1996 American Institute of Physics.