You know, I have a follow-up inquiry with all of this...
As for my camera, Nikon's D700, it is calibrated to shoot at Adobe RGB... and am just referencing Mr. Reichmann's awesome Camera To Print Tutorial series, where him and Mr. Schewe discuss color gamut and such...
So, I am capturing an image in Adobe RGB, but, have my workspace set to ProPhoto RGB - is that really pointless? Because to put it in Mike and Jeff's terms, I am taking my Adobe RGB bucket and just going and dumping it into this much larger ProPhoto RGB bucket, which, since ProPhoto is a much larger gamut, the contents of my Adobe RGB bucket will like only fill up two-thirds of the ProPhoto bucket workspace. As Jeff put it, to Mike's chagrin :-), the gamut of colors is cut off like in a sex change operation, in the Adobe RGB, compared to the fuller bucket of ProPhoto RGB - so why set one's workspace to ProPhoto RGB, when I'm bringing in an Adobe RGB file that's not going to have the full range of colors already coming in?
I can see if cameras could be set to capture in ProPhoto RGB, and obviously of course, you'd want to not lose any of the vast breadth of color gamut captured, and continue to work with all those colors in a ProPhoto RGB workspace. But, if the most one can shoot with is Adobe RGB, then shouldn't really one's workspace be set at Adobe RGB also?
Seriously, I'm asking.
And really, what's the point anyway? Because, either an image is going to be cut off even more and placed into a smaller bucket for display on monitors and/or devices, which for the majority, except for high end monitors, are only able to display sRGB at best and most. Or, it's going to be sent to be printed on a printer that is only able to reproduce a color gamut of maybe Adobe RGB at best... correct and enlighten me please if I am wrong.
So, I guess - what's the point of ProPhoto RGB now, in this day and age? Sure it's awesome and nice to be able to be able to work with such a huge bucket of colors, but when nothing captures in it (again, that my ignorant self is aware of, correct me if I am wrong), and work on monitors that can't display all of it, or all our end results being sent to devices, machines, printers that can't reproduce them all - is it really worth it, and just pointless to do so and use it?
Okay, just some curious questions that have been tossing around my head since watching the Camera To Print tutorials... and even more with my beginning this investment into getting monitors, printers, etc., and determining workflows.