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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?

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    If the colours look fine on both monitors on images viewed in Chrome and other browsers, then this sounds more like a bug with Irfanview. Not sure what we can do about that here. Perhaps irfanview's user forum would be a better place to ask this question. Tech support is off-topic here. Sorry about that. – Billy Kerr Sep 2 '20 at 10:41
  • No need to be sorry. If you're saying that what I'm doing doesn't seem to be wrong in principle, that's already really helpful! – NounVerber Sep 2 '20 at 13:39
  • Yes, you're doing absolutely nothing wrong as far as I can tell. sRGB is the standard colour profile for use on the web and it usually works everywhere. – Billy Kerr Sep 2 '20 at 14:46
  • Not sure I understand all the details in your description, and I'm not familiar with Irfanview. But a problem with not having an RGB profile embedded is usually that whatever viewer you use will display the untagged image with whatever RGB profile it is set up to use for untagged images. So if Irfanview is set up to use for example "Adobe RGB" as default, the untagged image will be shown as if it was an "Adobe RGB" image and the image tagged with "sRGB" will be shown correctly as an "sRGB" image. Could this be the problem? – Wolff Sep 2 '20 at 17:32
  • @Wolff No, because the problem only comes up IF I embed a color profile. – NounVerber Sep 3 '20 at 21:20

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