Colour management noob question

I am asking because I am wondering what's the pros for buying those wide gamut monitors if the best option is export everything in SRGB would be the better option for digital viewing, if viewing under the same SRGB monitor, embedding the correct ICC profile processed under a wide gamut space will still show a more desaturated image than exporting it in the SRGB space I don't understand what's the need for those prophoto/ARGB working space in LRC are for.

By @chik02402004

It depends on who the audience is. If the photos are expected to be viewed on older computer displays on systems or applications that don’t support color management and profiles, then sRGB is definitely the safe route.

But if most of your viewers are known to use recent displays run by an OS and apps that support color management, then exporting in a wider color space can look better. For example, Apple hardware is at the point where every new desktop display, laptop, phone, and tablet they sell today is both color-managed and wide gamut (P3). If someone with a current Apple display opens a wide gamut image with a profile, it should look as intended. On Windows, more web browsers support profiles now. (I think) all Samsung mobile devices have been wide gamut for a while, although color management support can vary. Most new TVs are wide gamut (P3 again), so if you connect one to a Mac or PC it can be color-managed. The point is that new devices from everybody have been trending toward wide gamut and increasing support for color management, so the old world of “mostly sRGB and not color managed” is slowly fading out.

For printing, more printing services today accept non-sRGB files as long as there is a profile attached. For example, the website for the popular printing service Bay Photo says that sending them Adobe RGB with an embedded profile is acceptable. This is useful when the image will be printed on a printer that has an ink set that extends its gamut beyond sRGB…now you can take advantage of that.

Also, in the last line you said “prophoto/ARGB working space.” When you say working space, that’s different than the question earlier in that paragraph about exporting. Working space is what you edit in, and the reason for editing in ProPhoto RGB or Adobe RGB is so that you don’t permanently clip out colors that you might want for future wider gamut output. For example, 25 years ago I edited images in an sRGB working space. The colors in those images can‘t ever go beyond that. Later inkjet printers were able to reproduce wider gamuts, but those old sRGB images couldn’t take advantage of them.

A few years later I started editing in Adobe RGB and ProPhoto RGB. When inkjet printers got even better and phones started coming with wide gamut displays, the colors in all those images could finally be seen by more people because the original wider gamut had been preserved, not permanenly thrown out by editing in sRGB.

An analogy: If you listen to recorded music, the original master recordings are made, edited, and stored at a far higher technical level of quality than the recording you get. This is so they can be mixed down to any media you might buy it on (MP3, CD, vinyl, cassette…). If they had started out saying “Most people will listen to it at 8 bits, 128Kb/sec” and recorded and edited it exactly that way, it would not have the quality to stand up to editing or be reproduced on better-sounding formats.

So in the end this is not just a Photoshop question. Regardless of the tools you use, in all professional media (photos, audio, video), you capture, edit, and archive your original at the highest quality you can afford, and mix that down to the different lower standards of each medium in which you expect to deliver the content.