WidE Gamut Monitor Color Space Emulation - Which One To Use?

[Steve House]

Just as I start to think I understand color management my brain short circuits and I get confused.  Have a new laptop on order, Dell XPS 15 with 4k UHD, Wide Gamut screen.  I understand it will come with Dell's PremiereColor application which will set it to emulate several color spaces ... Full (also called 'Vibrant'), DCI-P3, Rec 709, Rec 601, and for photography, sRGB and aRGB.  Will be using mainly Lightroom to process mainly Nikon NEF files.  My question is which emulation to use ... should it conform to the software's working color space (ie, 'aRGB' when in LR's Library since it's using aRGB on its previews and 'Full' when in the develop module where it's ProPhoto) or should it conform to the target color space, ie sRGB for images destined for export to the web, aRGB for photos to be exported in that color space, and 'full' to evaluate photos destined to be printed?  Or should I just set it to 'full', calibrate with my xRite, an fuggetabout switching?

[Pictus]

I prefer to keep my wide gamut monitor into its native gamut and no worries, that is why we got color management. 
I guess Dell XPS Full/Vibrant is native.

[Simon Garrett]

I prefer to keep my wide gamut monitor into its native gamut and no worries, that is why we got color management. 
I guess Dell XPS Full/Vibrant is native.

+1

I'd use the native (widest) gamut all or most of the time.  I'd use soft-proofing when I wanted to see what was clipped in narrower spaces.  I'm not familiar with how that Dell switches calibrations, but assuming one can have multiple calibrations for different colour spaces, and switch between them, then I'd have an sRGB calibration as well to check how things look on the web. That's what I do on my Eizo monitor. 

Note that Lightroom uses at least three different colour spaces to display images:

• ProPhoto RGB in Develop Module
• Adobe RGB in Library Module
• sRGB in Web Module, if I remember correctly

However, if the monitor is correctly calibrated and profiled, images will look the same in all three - except, obviously, for colours that are outside the narrower colour spaces. 

Further complications arise in that Develop uses ProPhoto RGB with linear Tone Response Curve (TRC) to diplay images, but applies sRGB's TRC for the histogram and for RGB values.