Let me state that I’m playing devils advocate a bit here and agree with Doug its useful to know what’s going on.
We have an “issue” with a few RGB working spaces that are not yet V4 savvy although as Doug found, a “beta” if you will is available for sRGB. Why Adobe has not built and supported any V4 working space profiles in Photoshop I can’t answer.
We don’t live in a perfect world and we certainly don’t live in a prefect color management world! That said, we often need to convert from larger to smaller color spaces. The lack of a perceptual table for the rarer cases we deal with working spaces isn’t a huge big deal (I’ll tell you one that’s much worse and really need attention later). The rare times I’d be moving from ProPhoto to sRGB is to pop images on the web. We all know what a mess that is in terms of color management! We all know how forgiving it is. Other than that (or sending someone an email with an image), the clipping when it occurs just doesn’t seem to be a big deal. Yes, I’d like more control with V4 profiles but I suspect they are not ready for prime time.
Even dealing with output using printer profiles, we often have to clip colors. This group is savvy enough to know that they want to start with a wider gamut than sRGB. Otherwise someone could argue, just set your cameras to JPEG sRGB, you’ll never clip colors going to another RGB working space. One could also argue that the clipping happened just after you clicked the shutter and the raw data was converted to sRGB in the camera. So we really are clipping again.
If I start from raw and encode in ProPhoto, I might go off to a press (and the gamut differences there between going off to newpaper vs. an Indigo is huge). We will clip colors. I had a Epson printer with 8 colored inks that until Monday was my widest gamut output device. Then a Canon i6300 with 11 inks showed up and my gamut clipping (or compression) needs just differed a bit.
Again, why we don’t have more control converting from RGB working space to working space in Photoshop using V4 profiles is not clear.
Now onto a real problem lots of people face that doesn’t require histograms or new revisions to the ICC spec. The “my prints are too dark” issue and some kooky ideas as to why this is an issue and the fix. I provide you this blog post:
http://lightroomkillertips.com/2010/video-the-trick-to-getting-brigher-prints/#comment-14876
We have a well known imaging expert suggesting that we alter the RGB values of
all our images for output to fix a problem that can be addressed with proper display calibration target values. I would welcome your thoughts on this because I think an article needs to be written that address this misconception (or the misconception that the prints are too dark, which they certainly can be for a number of reasons, some having
nothing to do with the RGB values in said document).