Yes. Currently that is the case. True.
That is correct if you are printing your images or sending it to the printer that knows how to use a printer profile. However if you are not printing your images, and many do not, or if you are printing your images, but you are sending it to some standardized printing lab/shop. Say, wedding photographers. Many would sand hundreds if not thousands of images to a lab for printing, but the lab would not be some tech savvy so they don’t really want you to play around with printer profiles. They want sRGB JPEG or TIFF and they will print just fine. That would be a situation where you would soft-proof for print, but in sRGB. Of course the real benefit is in the algorithms themselves that can be largely automated.
The same is true if you are posting your images on social media or web, even if you print them you still are likely to show a digital version on social media. Since you might be working in DXO Wide Gamut Color space, but that is a working color space, not output color space. For better of worse, the standard is still sRGB. So again, “Preserve Color Details” is a great benefit.
Well, as you have noted earlier. It will work with RGB profiles as far as I’ve seen, but not with CMYK profiles or some really custom ones. Why is that the case I am not sure. Maybe DXO will add it to other profiles eventually.
Well, personally I use “Preserve Color Details” when I export images in sRGB, which is for every use. Weather its for web or personal sharing. So I find it extremely useful myself. Because I don’t have to worry about losing details in saturated areas of the image, I can just pretty much set it and forget it when I export. So for me its a default feature now.
Basically in the pats and in other programs when you want to squeeze out of gamut colors into a smaller gamut, usually sRGB output profile, you usually have to make some compromises. Either desaturate the oversaturated colors or cut off out of gamut colors and lose details.
In the past we had several options. None of the options was very good. We could do it upon conversion from one color profile to the other, using typically either perceptual or relative colorimetric options. One desaturated colors the other cuts off out of gamut colors. They do this with no real control and pretty harshly.
If you wanted more control, you could have manually desaturated colors by using tools such as color saturation sliders or vibrancy. And while saturation slider affects saturation eventfully across the image, vibrancy slider tries to add more saturation to less saturated colors and less saturation to already saturated colors while giving more importance to skin tone colors than other colors. Which is fine. But it’s not very precise when you want to deal with out of gamut colors. It’s more of a creative tool where user relies on appearance.
DXO “Preserve Color Details” is really the best of all these tools with great control and simplicity. You basically are saturating only the colors that are out of the gamut based on target color space, while making sure texture remains visible. This provides the most saturation you can get out of something like sRGB, but with all the rich textures and fine gradations that would be much more of a hassle trying to get in other ways. Here it’s just more or less automatic process where you can just use one check box upon export. I love it and use it by default since it was introduced.
I only apply it from soft proof panel when I’m dealing with particularly tricky images. Otherwise it’s on by default on export.