Adobe RGB Color Management

Has anyone actually used Adobe RGB Color Management software with their laptop? I could not find any software at Adobe called Adobe RGB Color Management. It seems like Color Management is part of their software but not in a separate package.

And how come AW screen with Adobe RGB is so much more expensive than the one without it. If I want it, can I add Adobe RGB Color Management software later?

 

The short answer is that you don't need it.

Longer answer:
AdobeRGB is a colour standard which contains a wider range of colours than sRGB - the standard for a web and for most consumer display devices and printers.
So, if you use AdobeRGB properly from a good, high bit-depth source and use properly set up colour spaces for your display and printer, etc, you can get more realistic images.
BUT... if you use AdobeRGB in Photoshop without knowing much about it and don't forget to convert to sRGB before outputting your images to JPG or similar, you will see washed out colours and end up with worse-looking results than sticking to the more basic sRGB.
Also, if you convert sRGB images to AdobeRGB, you won't be gaining anything... so if you're only dealing with 8bit images I wouldn't bother.

So I wouldn't worry about it, unless you fancy reading up on colour management first.

As for the increased cost for a AdobeRGB capable display, it's because it's a niche product basically. AdobeRGB capable displays usually have fancy LUTs (lookup tables) to help ensure that they don't suffer from unwanted posterization when displaying subtle graduations in colour tones, etc.

 

Thanks, I don't even have a printer or use photoshop but I do want realistic color from Blu-ray, will Adobe RGB help me with that?

Also, I have seen a monitor calibrator in which you put the thing on your monitor and the software is supposed to do some adjustment to make the color more realistic. Is it a different software for different purpose?

 

If you just want good Blu-ray output, a hardware calibration device is almost certainly overkill IMHO. This is because you will want your display to look great less than you want it to look realistic (i.e. great looking colours, rather than true-to-life colours).

 

and I guess the Adobe RGB Color Management would even be less necessary for Blu-ray purpose?

 

Yup, in my opinion it would only be useful for colour critical content production. If your job doesn't depend on accurate colour, I wouldn't bother.

 

Exactly why Sony released two AWs (if you go to Japanese Sony website, it will ask you to choose either one before proceeding), one for photo with AdobeRGB, and the other for video that just have the plain old XBrite...