[muzfuz]

In many professional environments the preferred route is to use specialist hardware to send an RGB signal at a high bit rate and do any colour transformation in the monitor hardware.

Using LUTs either at the application or OS level to adjust colour information is a big no-no, although that doesn't stop some people from doing it. You simply don't want to change your colour space[1] until you absolutely have to.

The point of calibrating your monitor (which is a hardware + firmware level problem) is to see how your RGB image will look on a colour space restricted piece of hardware (for example in video this is often 12-bit RGB --> Rec709).

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_space

[jacobolus]

If you have some image data stored with reference to one color space, and you want to convert the data to a different color space (e.g. because you are targeting some particular output device), that is a gamut mapping problem. To learn about different trade-offs involved in choice of gamut mapping algorithms, I recommend Ján Morovič’s monograph, https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Color+Gamut+Mapping-p-9780470030...

Same story if you want to show your image on a display with a different gamut.

Most gamut mapping algorithms used in practice (whether on a display or in software) are actually pretty mediocre in my opinion. It would be possible to do substantially better by writing your own code, at the expense of being a bunch of work. Alas.

P.S. The Wikipedia article about color space (and articles about many other color-related topics) is pretty terrible, but I’ve been too lazy to rewrite it.