Quote Originally Posted by DanK View Post
Finally, although I can't reconstruct the arguments, I was persuaded by others that NEC's advice is correct: for photo editing for printing, don't set it for Adobe RGB; set it for Photo Editing, which uses the monitor's full gamut, and rely on softproofing.
That argument is interesting as it suggests that the screen exceeds the Adobe RGB colour space in certain areas (likely the yellows). As your printer likely exceeds the Adobe RGB colour space as well, this could be good advice; BUT if the screen is anything like the newer Apple P3 colour space screens it will show bright yellows that are OOG for both printing and sRGB.

The soft proofing argument is a bit counterproductive as it is an emulation that tries to represent a reflected light, subtractive colour process based on largely CMYK inks variants using an RGB, additive, transmitted light process that the screen uses. In my experience, soft proofing is perhaps an 80% - 90% solution and test prints are still needed to get a good understanding of colours.

The only thing that I use soft proofing for is to understand the OOG issues on the paper I am planning to use. Often this means I will select a wider gamut paper, rather than my original choice. This tends to be more of an issue with the OBA free cotton rag, fine art, matte papers; the baryta and other luster papers are generally pretty good, even with pigment based inks.