Ross I don't quite think you understand how colour spaces work in relationship to each other. Some quite pointers:
Printers definitely do not have AdobeRGB colour space. This is a space defined by a Red, a Green, and a Blue dot. It is physically impossible to make an additive colour system (such as a computer monitor with red green and blue) match a gamut of a subtractive colour system (such as a printer with it's CMYK). Printers have widely different looking colour spaces than monitors. Your typically very high end printer will have a half cyan/green that reaches just outside of the AdobeRGB gamut, and yet comes no where near the pure Green or Blue colours of AdobeRGB that can be achieved by high end computer monitors.
To clarify how things work you need to understand the differences between your working colour profiles, and your output profiles. You image taken with a camera in RAW is converted using the camera profile to the working space. This may be selected when you import into photoshop or if you use a tool like Lightroom you end up using MelissaRGB (a linearised variant of ProPhotoRGB). Typically most people will stick with sRGB as there is little advantage to doing anything else if your pictures don't go to print, and very many users don't print these days. The working profile you end up with defines the upper limits of the colour gamut.
Your calibrated display generates a display profile for you. What is happening is photoshop converts the working profile of the image to the display profile to ensure what you see is actually the right colour based on your earlier calibration.
When you print there's no such thing as "printers seem to use AdobeRGB". What happens when you hit the print button is photoshop will take the image along with it's working profile and pass it on to Windows Image Colour Management. The printer driver then feeds the colour profile
for the current selected settings to ICM to do the conversion to the correct printer profile, and then it gets fed to the print spooler to splat on your paper. The key here is the "current settings" bit. Your Canon printer will actually load a different colour profile depending on the quality settings and type of paper used. For PiXMA printers this profile is called "Canon <printer model> <designator>" where the designator is something like PR1 for Glossy Photo Paper Pro on high res, MR1 for matte photo paper, and there's about 10 different profiles the driver has to work with.
Now this conversion is loss less providing the printer's colour profile is as large or larger than the working profile, which I can guarantee you will never be the case due to the aforementioned colour adding and subtracting issue. So ultimately the printer space is always smaller in some regard than the monitor colour space, and you can see that if you print a pure rainbow coloured gradient. For less dramatic (real life) type pictures the effect will be more subtle (unless you live in vegas and are doing night time photos
). So the added step of soft proofing needs to be done for that perfect match. Soft proofing takes the working profile, converts it to the printer profile, and then converts it back to the display profile and should show you the colours as your printer will reproduce.
If you're having issues where AdobeRGB gives you better results that match a monitor, and your monitor is not fancy wide gamut monitor, then
I suggest disabling colour management completely in the windows driver and take control of it in photoshop. That would allow you to customise rendering intents and compensation as well as override whatever printer profile your driver blindly selects for you.
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