I personally use my own custom software for many design tasks, and I can tell you from personal experience that better color models make a dramatic improvement. But my methods are currently highly technical and idiosyncratic and closer to experiments than polished tools for non-programmers.

Since the “proof” here involves low-level changes to design tools that have had millions of man-hours of work put into them and don’t provide end-user-accessible hooks into their low-level guts, it isn’t easy for me to “prove” anything to you via Hacker News comment: your “proof” would basically need to be a rewrite from scratch of these complex tools, and I haven’t yet spent the several years of implementation work it would require.

It is a long-term goal of mine though to make a series of products. Knock on wood.

If you want to see real-world examples, some professional color-grading software aimed at film production (for instance Apple’s Final Cut Pro) uses the IPT model. Even in Adobe tools, there is certain limited support for CIELAB, which is not perfect but far better than RGB. Here’s a book about it http://www.amazon.com/dp/0321356780 .... unfortunately these all still have shitty user interfaces for interacting with colors, but it’s better than nothing.

In the physical world, artists and designers have been using the Munsell Book of Color in various incarnations for >100 years with great success. You can buy your own for $1000: http://www.pantone.com/munsell-book-of-color-matte-edition

For color correction you cannot do better than this book: http://www.amazon.com/Professional-Photoshop-Classic-Guide-C...

It's a great book for engineers working with color, as its principles are explained through color theory and the mathematical relationships between colors.

Most photoshop 'experts' are people who have dicked around with it forever and just haphazardly learned the tools, Margulis comes from a much more empirical place and shows how to manipulate color in ways that are more natural and less damaging to images by using as few tools as possible.

Additionally, you'll learn a ton about color theory, which is worthwhile by itself.

If you finish that book, this one is awesome as well: http://www.amazon.com/Photoshop-LAB-Color-Adventures-Colorsp...