This discussion is very interesting and helpful. I hope I'm not
highjacking the thread by adding in the following complication: if
you've created a monitor profile (I did mine using Huey), where
does it fit in? Do you make any changes to the color space in PS or
in DPP? In DPP/Tools/Preferences/
Color Matching Settings for Display, you can choose between a
monitor profile or sRGB. Which is advisable?
I'll try and answer succinctly. I will fail.
Working colorspaces are used so that the numbers in the files can be interpreted as having "exact and widely understood" meanings of the colors they represent.
Getting those colors to display appropriately on a device is done by color conversion as the output is rendered. It is entirely inappropriate to set a colorspace to a monitor profile for instance. Chances are that in a week or two's time your monitor profile will have drifted and you will no longer be able to recover correct color information from your file. This is why "generic colorspaces" (sRGB, aRGB, ProPhoto, WideGamut etc.) exist.
You then have to work out the individual settings for individual applications that are going to get in on the act of color conversions. For display, the application (DPP, PS) typically offers color conversion functionality, then the OS/graphics card gets in on the act and if you're unlucky, the monitor is pretending to have a non-native gamma setting too. For print, you have to work out if the print driver is doing it or whether the application is doing it. The worst option is to work in a wide gamut space then convert to sRGB before passing to the print driver that uses a profile specific to the loaded paper/inkset. If possible, you want to just have a single conversion to the output color profile.
"Rendering intents" also get involved. Rendering intents are used when the source colors are being squeezed into an output colorspace with a smaller gamut. The rendering has to have instructions on how to deal with out of gamut color. Generally "perceptual" will avoid nasty and obvious color clipping but might involve some color shifts as colors approach saturation. "Relative colorimetric" will hang on longer with accurate color representation, but out of gamut clipping will be quite harsh and obvious. YMMV
If you are getting truly serious about color integrity, you start choosing your working colorspace based on fundamental factors such as illuminant and gamma. ICC and PS internal systems are all indexed on the D50 illuminant, so using a D50 based colorspace means less processing takes place. If you use a D50 monitor calibration as well, you will get warmer color rendition than is typical of web viewing and sRGB but it will be fairly close for print matching. Epson print profiles are calibrated for D50 illuminant as well, so it is fairly easy to set up a D50 gamma 2.2 color managed environment from raw processing to finished product. I care most about my printed output, so this is what I use...
... working: BetaRGB
... display: D50, gamma 2.2, 80cd/m^2
... print: Epson 7800 using perceptual rendering
I cross check my post-processing to make sure that on-screen display in D65/sRGB looks sensible.
I found this to be an excellent resource and it lists generic color spaces with their illuminants and gammas
http://www.brucelindbloom.com/index.html?BetaRGB.html
In answer to the question about DPP/PS settings and Pantone Huey...
... if the Huey is producing a profile, then somewhere in your display chain you should be using it. In DPP you should specify your monitor profile instead of sRGB. I suggest you use perceptual rendering intent. The print profile is a poor implementation in DPP. I suggest you set the print profile to the same as your working space profile (to avoid any conversion) and then let the printer driver do the final rendering to a paper/ink specific profile. YMMV
Someone else will need to answer for PS.
