Serious struggles with color profiles and monitor- HELP

[stickwolf]

I've searched and searched. I hope someone can help me here.

I calibrated my iMac G5 monitor using the expert built-in calibration, and everything on my screen generally looks fantastic. The windows and desktop pictures and web images all look good.

I use two browsers: Safari and Firefox. Firefox ignores color profiles but Safari uses them. Generally, posted photos here from users look great in Firefox and either the same in Safari (if there somehow is no embedded profile) or they are too dark.

My Canon S3IS puts a generic "Camera RGB" profile on each image. When these are opened in Firefox or some other non-profile-using program they look pretty darn good straight out of the camera. They look similar to the look on the S3's LCD display. When I open them in a photo program that uses profiles they are too dark. It's as though the computer is ignoring the fact that I calibrated my monitor. It is adjusting the image to a point that would probably look good if my monitor were overly bright washed-out uncalibrated.

I can't adequately make decisions about editing or saving photos if they look way darker than they really are. And it isn't my monitor. Really. Most normal things look very good and balanced on my monitor.

If I assign the monitor profile to the images, then it works, or if I discard the profile so there is no color managing happening it is the same result. I really wish I understood why this was happening and why the profiles aren't getting the idea that my monitor is not in need of extra darkening to get balanced images. But the solution would seem to be to find a way to remove profiles from all my images, or better yet get the S3 to not assign profiles.

Problem is, all I know how to do is use a graphic program (Preview on the mac is simplest) to re-assign or remove the profile so the file looks normal and can be edited. And using those programs and saving results in a re-compressing of the jpg which means some minor image info loss. I don't want to re-save the jpg, I just want to strip the color profile.

Is there any way to just do a bulk stripping or re-assigning of color profiles?? Or is there another way to do this? Am I going about this wrong? This is so frustrating.

Thanks,
Aaron

[stickwolf]

Update:

I guess the S3 is actually embedding a "sRGB IEC61966-2.1" profile, which most programs don't even recognize, therefore pics look normal (good!) in almost every program, except a few, such as LightRoom, where they are too dark. If I assign the monitor profile or delete the profile everything is fine. So, is there any reason not to just bulk delete all the embedded profiles from my shots? Is there a way to get the S3 to stop embedding profiles? Is there a program to do this without otherwise messing with the image data? Is there something else I should do?

[stickwolf]

Update:

Colorsync apparently doesn't even recognize the sRGB... profile and thinks there isn't one, so a script I found that removes profiles doesn't actually successfully remove it, and Adobe programs still see the profile and make the image too dark.

BUT... I found a script that embeds the monitor profile, and then everything looks right across programs. So I now have a way to change ALL the images in bulk to the calibrated monitor profile, resulting in my experience being what seems right and looks good. But before I go ahead and do that to all my files, someone PLEASE tell me if there is some reason not to do this. I don't want to regret it later.

For reference, I'm more interested in digital viewing and web sharing than in printing, but I still want quality and I don't want printing to be impossible or look totally wrong.

Wouldn't a pic that looks great on my monitor that has my monitor's color profile embedded be just fine? Or no?

And it still doesn't make sense to me that a pic that looks good on the camera LCD looks too dark on my monitor when the embedded profile is used... remember that generally things on my monitor do not look too dark.