I have always embedded color profiles in my images because I thought it was a good practice, without really understanding the details of how it works.
Today I noticed something alarming:
I had opened a photo which had no colorprofile in Photoshop and clicked on "assign working RGB: sRGB".
Then, after some minor image manipulation, I saved it with "ICC profile: sRGB" checked.
Now, when I open the 2 photo in Irfanview (before and after) on my second monitor, they look identical. But if I open them on my main monitor, the colors look different.
However, when I save the manipulated photo without embedding a color profile, the before and after versions look the same. When I open the images in chrome or when I disable "color managing" in Irfanview, they also always look the same. (The profile Irfanview was using was my monitor's profile).
I definitely want my files to look the same no matter what monitor or program I'm using but apparently I don't know how to go about that. I thought the point in embedding a color profile was to avoid something like this happening. The "Color managing" option in Irfanview sounds like a good thing but it makes the colors less accurate. What is going on?