Reading through the French forum EOS-Numerique I came across a post that got me thinking... From HiFi to pixel count we always go for the big numbers as we can always down-sample later on. We also apply the same logic to thinking about wide Gamuts: set up LR to ProPhoto, because *one day* printers and monitors will all reach that wide gamut and angels will sing. However...
Aren't we shooting ourselves in the foot by choosing too wide a gamut? - Let me explain: most users go through a largely sRGB chain so, rather than downsampling once all the adjustments have been made, why not use the reduced colour space immediately and then have no surprises when printing?
If a user is a bit more sophisticated but is still on an amateur budget and they have, say, an iMac (full sRGB gamut) and an Epson R3000 (wide gamut), then what is the point of going beyond sRGB? - You will get a broader range of colours that you will have actually never seen on screen. I am not talking about the smoothing of colours within a photograph's boundaries, but additional colours that will have been specified beyond sRGB in the conversion between the ProPhoto workspace of LR and the (say) Adobe RGB+ gamut of the printer. Will these additional colours be better? - Maybe/maybe not. The thing is that you will have no control over them.
Am I missing something?
Thanks for your thoughts
François