I guess color management is too much bother to use, right?
i'm still trying to figure that out. it's not clear i'm missing
anything by living in an sRGB world. and it is clearly more work
to live in both if you share images online. so i've added to my
reading list today by ordering scott kelby's book and digital
dog's... i am sure i will be back with questions...
There are three areas where you need to look with respect to color gamut:
1. The gamut of the capture device. In reality, digital cameras and scanners don't have a gamut (they have what is called a color mixing function). None the less there is a gamut to film (which limits what the scanner produces). There's a real world of color gamut we see and it's pretty huge. Anytime you see one of those horseshoe plots of color (CIE chromaticity diagram), you're seeing the gamut of human vision. A digital camera can capture a huge range of color. All you need to do is take a RAW file of a very colorful scene in Adobe Camera RAW and examine it's Histogram for color clipping. I have tons of images that fall far outside Adobe RGB gamut. IF (big if) I want to contain the colors I shot, I need to use a much larger gamut like ProPhoto RGB (in 16-bit).
When you set your camera to sRGB or Adobe RGB (1998) and throw away the RAW file, you have no control over this. However, there's no question that selecting Adobe RGB will provide a larger gamut of captured colors compared to sRGB assuming the scene has a larger gamut than sRGB. That's pretty likely. Is capturing those important to you?
2. The gamut of the output device. You've decided that you do want to contain colors in the scene your capture device has collected. Now there's the gamut of the output device. Anyone that tells you "no output device exceeds sRGB" is smoking some very bad stuff or simply doesn't know what they are talking about. Again, by viewing a gamut plot (in 3D preferably), you can find all kinds of output devices that have colors that it can reproduce outside of sRGB. Are those color important to you? As I mentioned, the new K3 inkset from Epson produces colors that fall outside of Adobe RGB (1998)!
3. There's the gamut of your display. 99.9% of users have a gamut that's no larger than sRGB. There are new displays on the market that exceed Adobe RGB (1998) but at a huge cost (today). So there ARE colors you can capture and output you can't see on your sRGB display. The question becomes, do you throw away those colors you captured AND CAN reproduce away because you can't see them all? I think not but maybe some do.
This is all about flexibility and future output needs. IF you know that the scene gamut/camera can't exceed sRGB AND you know your printer can't produce anything larger than sRGB (get a new printer ), then sure, stick with sRGB. But if you look at just Epson and the evolution of increasing gamuts in ink technology, why paint yourself into a corner???
Those silly labs that tell you "just send is sRGB and all is well" are either lazy, don't understand color management or simply don't want YOU to decide how to handle YOUR files! There are NO printers on the planet that produce sRGB!!! The only sRGB device is a CRT display in a very fixed and defined environment. In fact sRGB is a totally synthetic color space designed using pure math (as are all the other RGB working spaces). These labs just don't want to profile their devices so you can soft proof the image, they don't want to worry about embedded profiles and want their automatic systems to simply assume all files are sRGB. Then they do a conversion to the printer color space on the fly. It makes them very productive. However, you lose a lot of control over how you render an image for an output device.
--
Andrew Rodney
Author of Color Management for Photographers
The Digital Dog
http://www.digitaldog.net 
