Hello

There does seem to be a bit of confusion, or at least uncertainty here, and as usual, a lot of it comes from not using the correct words for your intended meaning. (Or, I just misread what I ran across here… )

-Regarding your monitor, there is ***calibrating*** AND there is ***profiling***. (These are often done by the same software/hardware, with the calibration first, followed by profiling.) They are not the same thing.

***Calibration*** is getting the brightness, and gamma correct. By correct, I mean that the R, G and B, when given equal numerical values, should produce a shade of gray, with no color tinting at all.

So, Red 128, Green 128, and Blue 128 should give you middle gray, while 200,200,200 would be very light gray and 60,60,60 would be very dark gray. Thing is, your monitor is different from every other monitor in the world, and it’s extremely likely that those perfectly matched numbers are off by a bit. The blue may be a bit stronger, and leave a blue tint, or the green or red could be too bright or too dark. The process of ***calibration*** then uses your hardware puck to read known values of various shades of RGB and make an adjustment to those colors so that your monitor will put out a true gray tone, and not one that is “almost” gray, when presented with equal RGB values.

Obviously if your monitor is not “gray balanced” then everything else you do on it will be equally out of shape.

So, part one is that you MUST begin with a **calibrated** monitor. 

Calibration is an adjustment of the device itself – in this case your monitor.

Next, we ***profile*** the monitor. It’s quite similar, but instead of aiming for a correct, un-tinted gray, we aim for known COLOR values. The software will put up a long sequence of colors, in various intensities (luminosity) then read and record the results.

The software knows (since it’s generating those color patches) what the value _should_ be, and compares it to what the hardware actually reads as shown on your screen.

(How do we know those reading-numbers are valid? Because we -calibrated- the monitor in step one, above.)

Unlike making an _adjustment_ of an actual device, profiling _measures_ results.

And, just as we expected variations from the ideal when calibrating, we expect the same when reading known colors. A patch of blue that should be 76, 135, 201 may actually read 78 134, 204 (too red, not green enough, and overly blue).

The profile does this for from 10’s to 100’s of colors, according to your settings when you run the profile. (Yes, more patches equals greater color fidelity.)

That resulting table of numbers is your monitor’s -profile-. (I’m oversimplifying here, but that’s basically it.)

If you’re following along closely, you can see that if you make a profile using a bright monitor, the color-number readings will be different from the same profile made from a monitor with the brightness turned down.

So, last but not least: DO NOT change the brightness or any other settings on your monitor after you have calibrated and profiled your monitor! These are controlled by knobs, buttons, sliders or whatever on the -hardware- that is your monitor. The -software- you are running (including the image profile) has no way to make physical changes to your monitor, so leave it all alone!

An sRGB image from a friend will look correct on your monitor, as will an AdobeRGB from your own camera.(** see below) You have finally got it to a place where it can handle anything that has a profile embedded. If you have a workspace mismatch between the image and Photoshop, PS will ask if you want to switch to the image’s workspace. (The answer is “yes” 99% of the time.)

That’s the whole point of going through all this in the first place! The CMM (Color Management Module) will take the profile from the sRGB image, and using the PCS and your monitor profile, show you what your friend saw when he sent it to you. You don’t have to do anything more but to open it up in a color-managed application, such as Photoshop.

Do not even consider trying to edit and/or print an image from monitor that has not been calibrated and profiled, unless you enjoy sword-fighting with Zorro.

Do not ever set your monitor profile to anything other than the profile you just so painstakingly created. Absolutely do not set it to sRGB or AdobeRGB, as that would be like taking a nice full basket of ripe apples, and replacing the contents with rocks. 

* Notes and caveats

Obvious caveat #1: your monitor has to have a gamut that can display the full size of the working space. Virtually all devices can display sRGB accurately. Spend more money for a “wide gamut” monitor, and you can see not only the sRGB, but the Adobe RGB space as well. Other monitors have different working spaces. If you are working to make prints, you probably want AdobeRGB since it was designed to bridge from the digital domain to the CMYK of printers, and also offer a more nuanced color range. sRGB is ideal for digital display, such as the internet. DCI-P3 is best for video.

 JPEGs usually have an embedded colorspace profile for the image. Usually sRGB, but others could have been used. Raw (“raw” not “RAW”) files do not exist in a color space, and so do not have embedded profiles. (Well… some raw files actually embed a sRGB jpg image in the raw data, and that may have a profile attached, but a raw file is a file, not an image.) 

 You can convert “down” from AdobeRGB to sRGB pretty successfully, but not from sRGB to AdobeRGB, since there is no way to magically “upscale” the sRGB gamut. 

 Monitors come with different bit-depths, and a 10-bit monitor will show more (not wider, but more nuanced) colors than an 8-bit. This most obviously appears in dramatically reduced banding in transition areas, such as the sky. In a better-than-average world you have a 10-bit, wide-gamut monitor.

 ** Profile conversion

 The monitor profile all by itself is not useful, because in fact, it takes -two- profiles to work with images: the one for your monitor and the one from the image file. And to get them to work together, there is a place where they meet: the “Profile Connection Space” (PCS) which is an idealized colorspace that includes the range of human vision. To make things work, so that a given image appears correctly on a given profiled monitor, the monitor profile-numbers point to a given color in the PCS. Then that same color is pointed at by the profile-numbers from the image (sRGB or ARGB or whatever). The monitor profile will be off by thus-and-such, while the image file will be off by this-and-that. The Color Management System (CMS) does the necessary math to make the Just-so Yellow RGB values in the image translate to new RGB values in the monitor so that the yellow appears identical.

and…THAT is why you don’t want to change your monitor profile or otherwise adjust your monitor.

Yeah: to some extent at least, this stuff is rocket science…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_management

https://www.viewsonic.com/library/photography/color-management-guide/ (for beginners)

https://color.org/ (for not-beginners)