Andrew - I agree that Adobe really hasn't given us much in Photoshop, at least since 6.0 especially. In fact, things have gotten worse in PS in many respects - 'No Color Management' has been removed and perfectly good custom printer profiles don't always show up in the Print dialog. Profiling CMYK Postscript laser printers and Greyscale processes is more difficult than ever. Arg!
Actually I don't believe we agree <g>. First off, Adobe has done quite a bit in terms of color management since Photoshop 6. We now have a far better way to handle scene referred raw data thanks to DNG camera profiles. We have a free product to both build and edit them thanks to Adobe. They have since provided new functionality in Convert to Profile allowing the use of LUT's and abstract profiles. It isn't anything I care about but it shows they are at least working to improve functionality. We have Lightroom which makes color management far easier has soft proofing, and a far, better environment for soft proofing and in handling output specific edits and on virtual copies too boot. And the Print module makes color management far easier. As for No Color Management in Photoshop, that was the right move to make IMHO. It just confused users. It only served two purposes, one being output of targets to build profiles which isn't and shouldn't be their responsibility. You can also thank Apple for them removing that feature as Apple kept screwing everything up from OS release to OS release. They could fix the scaling issue in the free Adobe Color Print Utility but seriously, to print such targets, it's X-rite and DataColor's job, not Adobe's.
Good custom printer profiles not showing up is a new one for me.
Unfortauntely, relative to 1998 there isn't much money in color management - companies like XRite, Datacolor, etc can't invest the kind of resources that they could 10+ years ago. CM is a commodity now, not an exciting new frontier. I see the lousy calibration process in so many RIPs as one of the few remaining areas where developers can still contribute heavily too, and hope that happens soon. We'll see.
Can't speak for Datacolor because they don't have any products I'd even look at! They did a pretty good job of copying other products and (OK I'll say it) ripping them off. Be it X-rite's Passport solution within LR (their implantation SpyderCal was simply silly), or Spydergallery (which doesn't appear to even work), SpyderCube which existed years before they even though about it (I believe Ken Boydston at Megavision produced a product just like it in the 90s), then they ripped off Michael Tapes with their SpyderLensCal product. So unlike X-rite, they get zero respect from this dog! They need to invest in some original ideas!
Meanwhile, we're still stuck at version 1.5 of i1Profiler, the big overhaul and uber color product to replace no less than two high end packages that remains buggy, has a pretty aweful UI and is missing a whole lot of functionality we had in ProfileMaker Pro/Profiler. Yes the color engine IS better. That was big news like 3+ years ago. They spent enormous engineering resources (and poorly) building XRD which serves end users nothing but headaches and zero benefits. And they have spent that little enginering resource creating products forthcoming that will likely be of little interest to this audience while leaving i1P rotting on the fine. They did a great job with the Passport and associated software. That's about the last good product they created for the photo market.
So my perspective is, there hasn't been much to celebrate in terms of color management in the last 10 years outside Adobe and partially X-rite. There are the little guys thankfully like Danny Pascale at BableColor and Robin Myers who brought us SpectraVision. Oh and Steve Upton who at least keeps ColorThink running and ocassionally fixes bugs. He's focused on Maxwell which is a very, very cool product but for a niche market that few at LuLa would look at or need. Few here need ColorThink, that's a color geek tool.
As for RIPs, not my expertise but they've traditionally been expensive, complext and a big PITA, no wonder there are entire color management consultants who specialize in that area alone. That's needed. I had my fill with ImagePrint back when it first came out on OS9 (nightmare) which was focused on the photo industry, my area of concentration.