With that said however, I am not sure how useful any of this really is. I notice images edited on my desktop in the usually way (raws in Lightroom, color management, exported jpgs moved to the ipad via itunes sync) look good on the ipad. Perhaps a little more contrasty and a tad brighter; but they still look good. The same can not be said of images edited on the Ipad and transferred back to my desk top. Sure, jpgs pop on the ipad; but once these unedited - or lightly edited jpgs - get back to a color managed desk top they look like crap - very dull, unsaturated, bad white balances, etc.. Yuk.
I guess this makes sense as the ipad is not color managed. I also wonder that the Photosync utility is doing to the images. Does it convert to sRGB? Does it just ignore color profiles all together? If the ipad apps are working on the stripped out jpg of my raws it should be tagged with sRGB. What if I set my camera to adobe RGB?
As an experiment I used PhotoSync to transfer a tiff of a well known color reference image. It's one from Bill Atkinson I think. It has a bunch of images on it. One with bright yellow trees, another of orange-red sandstone from perhaps Arches National park in America. Another image has bright red strawberries. You guys would know this image. Anyway, after using photosync to move it to my ipad it didn't look good at all. Using the ipad's default photo viewer the image was all pixelated. Not sure what the issue is there. Using Snapseed the image displayed okay but the red of the strawberries changed from bright red to very dark red with less saturation. Definitely some color management issues there.
For my next experiment I am going to print some of these ipad edited photos and see how they look.