I wrote this as a response to a question about wide-gamut monitors in the people photo forum but thought it might also be of interest here:
AdobeRGB and sRGB are just arbitrary sub-sets of coordinates within the larger CIE*Lab space which represents the range of human vision. When a color which falls outside of one space and is converted to a smaller space its Lab coordinates are changed, and so too is the color relative to the Lab gamut. The rendering intent selected for the color management engine controls how the color values are converted. So if you need an image in sRGB space for web use all you need to do is convert it to sRGB in Photoshop. Photoshop will conform the color to the space "by the numbers".
The main benefit for having a wide gamut monitor isn't to simply display prettier colors. sRGB gamut monitors can't simulate CYMK gamuts very well because many CYMK colors fall outside of sRGB - CYMK is a smaller gamut in terms of volume, but it is a different shape. The larger gamut monitor is needed to accurately simulate what a CYMK printed image will actually look like when soft proofing (i.e. viewing with printer profile) is applied in Photoshop. That's a huge consideration in the publishing industry where approval for million dollar print ad campaigns across a dozen different magazines are all done on the basis of an art director seeing and approving a proof.
The reason color management came into existence was so an art director could see an image on a proof and have a reasonable expectation that the reproduction in a magazine would look the same. Originally the problem was one of matching the gamut of proofing papers and inks to production papers and inks. In the 1970s pre-press proofing systems such as Cromalin and Matchprint were introduced to allow proofs to be produced directly from CYMK separation film - a huge time and cost saver. I used both when they were first introduced - it was my introduction to color management. I also selected and worked with some of the first systems which tried to do the same thing electronically. Back in the early 1990s we bought a $120,000 Japanese photo proofing system which photographed the four separate films from a high-end scanner on a light table with a B&W digital camera and then displayed them on a RGB reference monitor which cost more than my car. It didn't work all that well... The point of the history lesson is to illustrate that in graphic arts people have been searching for a solution which would accurately simulate a printed image on screen long before digital cameras arrived on the scene. An accurate electronic pre-press proof has been the Holy Grail of publishing - long sought and never found - until now... more or less.
Back when Adobe introduced color management to Photoshop it had a brief flirtation with the 800 pound gorilla in Seattle and made sRGB the default color space. By that time the professional graphic arts community were all using Mac which used a 1.8 gamma and had more or less standardized on Radius Pressview monitors -- the first ones with any type of calibration - which had a "paper white" white point of 5000K and used 1.8 gamma to better simulate the appearance of a printed page. The sRGB version of Photoshop (I think it was v3) didn't work for the designers and there was a near boycott -- people didn't upgrade. Adobe fixed the problem in the next version by incorporating ColorSync - which was first added to the Mac OS in 1992 - and invented a new working space, AdobeRGB(1998). At the time there were no monitors which could display it. It was designed as a translation space for RGB-to-CYMK. It was just large enough to fit the both the sRGB and CYMK SWOP gamuts inside of it.
SWOP = Standards for Web Offset Printing. I worked for a printing company which helped create that standard. It was the standard for press proofs and production inks to standardize proofing. Advances in ink-jet printing have now exceed Adobe RGB. Here's a comparision of AbobeRGB with the gamut of a 8/C HP printer on premium glossy paper:
So how best to utilize that 92% monitor (92% of what?): soft proofing for printing.
Start with an image in your preferred working space: http://super.nova.org/TP/ColorMang/OGW1.jpg
Then apply your printer profile in soft proofing with the out of gamut warning enabled: http://super.nova.org/TP/ColorMang/OGW2.jpg
That will grey out all the colors you see on screen your printer can't match. To get an approximate simulation on screen of what the print will actually look like when the you need to adjust the image -- usually saturation levels -- until the OOG warning disappears: http://super.nova.org/TP/ColorMang/OGW3.jpg
In that image I was able to reduce saturation in the blue colors to eliminate the out of gamut colors without affecting the skin tone or other colors on the foreground subject much. After the OOG colors are eliminated the image will look flatter and less saturated, but the same thing will happen if the unadjusted file is printed because the inks are simply not physically capable or reproducing reds, blues and purples with the amount of saturation a RGB screen can display.
This illustrates the real purpose of color management and why it was created; to predict and simulate the final reproduction during editing on screen. Editing in soft proofing with the OOG warning enabled allows changes, such as increase contrast in midtone-to-highlights, to overcome the limitations of the output medium. It is a bit like flying in the clouds with instruments, but if you trust the numbers and what Photoshop is telling you the results, while not matching the best the screen can display - which is impossible - are as predicted by the proof. The publishing business that equals a satisfied customer whose reasonable expectations are being met. Show the customer the best possible saturated colors on your screen and they will be screaming for a free reprint (and your head) when they see the image in print.
