Andrew Rodney describes Color management in Lightroom (pdf)

We didn?t see much in the way of color management in Photoshop until v. 5.0, nearly 8 years after its initial release, and it was still
rough around the edges. For a 1.0 product, Lightroom looks promising with respect to color management, but it?s a delicate balancing act.

I can live without LAB or CMYK support, but hope to see true soft proofing in a future version. The lack of multiple working spaces isn?t a serious limitation for me. In fact, if you only work with raw files, all you really have to do is set Lightroom to always export in 16-bit ProPhoto RGB. It will be interesting to see how the market reacts to Lightroom, and how the product will evolve in response to wide user feedback.

This is one area where a dumbing down is exactly the right solution. I wonder if part of the problem is the language of “Relative Colorimetric”, “Perceptual rendering” and so on. No wonder people are killing themselves swallowing ink cartridges rather than grapple with this matrix of big words. Time to wheel out my favourite Orwell quote - “a mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details.”

Via Lightroom News.