Which sRGB Profile to use (HP sRGB Profile, ICC BPC, ICCnoBPC, or no profile)?

Question

Hi everyone,
May I ask something of you guys? I have a question that no one can seem to answer.
I don't know which is the best profile to use--the HP sRGB Profile, the ICC sRGB BPC, the ICC sRGB with no BPC, or no profile (just colorspace tagged as sRGB).
They are all sRGB_IEC61966-2, but the HP sRGB one that is native to older versions of CS (and possibly newer ones?) does not state whether it is BPC or nonBPC.
I have noted several things (and I know little of color profiles, so please excuse my ignorance):
1) Firefox displays all the profiles the same way, except noBPC is shown with lighter blacks
2) Adobe seems to represent the sRGB BPC and the HP sRGB similarly?
3) Some people suggest using no profile, merely tagging the metadata to say sRGB
4) The ICC website says that most V2 color profiles on the www are black scaled; other sites seem to say its the opposite: that BPC is a new thing to most people who save sRGB V2.....
5) BPC = Black scaling.
Help ! I'm completely at a loss for what is the most future-proofed means to do this. Each road seems to have a disadvantage.
Any help would be great
Tod

Answer 1

I'm dropping in kind of late, here, and I haven't read the thread thoroughly, but I thought I would add a few cents worth about why you might want to choose certain profiles.
It's important to start with this: 
Your choices of color profiles to use for the various functions in your system and for publishing images MUST be made individually, based on how you want to work, and what you anticipate the recipients of your images need. 
Understand that there is no "one size fits all" answer, which is why you're given configuration choices.  It's important to actually understand color-management to make the proper choices, and many people fail to take the time to do so.
Document Color Profiles
For general web publishing, many folks think it's a good idea to publish images in the sRGB color space and with an embedded sRGB profile.  This is because many browsers didn't used to do color management, and Windows in general assumes sRGB.  Even today, not all browsers do proper color management, and sRGB is just assumed in some cases.  If you are serious about web publishing, you probably want to learn just what Internet Explorer, FireFox, Safari, Chrome, and a number of others (and in all their various versions) actually DO regarding color-management, and knowing your intended audience make your own intelligent choices.
I'll add that as the browser landscape changes (and it is always changing), any "rule of thumb" about which profile to use for web publishing probably needs to be re-evaluated again at intervals in the future.
For sending images to family or friends electronically, pretty much the same thing applies as with web publishing.  Assuming a user is looking at the image you just sent him/her in Outlook or another mail client, the app may or may not be doing color management, and sRGB image data is probably most likely to be interpreted without problems.  However, you may know something about your recipient's color capabilities and make a different choice.
For sending images to print houses, quite often they want "standard" sRGB images as well.  However, if they DO offer wide gamut printing, limiting your images to sRGB will mean you won't get all the advantages of their full color depth and your prints may look a bit dull compared to what they could look like.  Don't assume; find out from them what their recommendations are for document color profile.  Again, details matter, and the more you know the better choices you can make.
Working Color Profiles
What color spaces you choose to work in in Photoshop have something to do with the results you want to make, and also something to do with the workflow you're willing to adopt.  It may be that you prefer to work on color images in sRGB so that he RGB values you manipulate all through your processing will be the very same ones you provide in your published output images.  Or you may prefer to work with images of the widest possible gamut because you have need to print or otherwise publish your images with a wider gamut than sRGB.  You could even start work with a wide gamut profile (e.g., ProPhoto RGB) for the advantages in maintaining all your images' fidelity, then ultimately publish sRGB - you just have to be sure and make the proper conversion at some point in the workflow.
It's important to note that Photoshop's Color Settings define your preferences - i.e., how you want Photoshop to handle things (or set defaults or just let you know) when there are choices.  Personally, I like to check all the boxes so that I will be asked if an image isn't in my preferred color space.
Also note that the Camera Raw plug-in offers a choice of output color space that's separate from the main Photoshop settings.
Device Color Profiles
Your display system can be calibrated and profiled.  Calibration generally describes the process of manipulating the output signals so that they are generally the right brightnesses - the response of your display is its Gamma, which should be close to 2.2 on a PC.  Once calibration is achieved, profiling a monitor is generally a matter of sending a bunch of different RGB values to it, seeing what it displays, measuring the difference between that and the ideal color, and setting up to make the proper corrections for future image displays.
You associate a monitor profile with your monitor using the operating system, even though the operating system only helps with color-management when applications request it.  You may wish to create a monitor profile that matches your monitor's display characteristics - there are devices that come with software and procedures to help you do this, and there are even ways you can do a rough job visually without a device.  This allows Photoshop and other color-managed applications to perform conversions to accurately represent colors from a document with its own profile on your monitor.
However, you have to understand that not every application on your system is color-managed, and you might actually be looking at RGB values expressed in a document color space and displayed on your monitor without transformation.  Also some transformations are done with shallow data and can introduce noise.  Perhaps you want to minimize the difference because there are tools you like that don't do color-management, or because you know that Internet Explorer 9 assumes your monitor displays sRGB.  It's normal that color-managed and non-color-managed applications can show the very same images differently on a calibrated and profiled system.  This confuses many folks
Note that the Windows default monitor profile is sRGB IEC61966-2.1.  Depending on your monitor, there can be advantages to making your display respond similarly to sRGB and just using sRGB for your monitor profile.
Many local printers can be profiled as well.  There are devices to allow you to do this.  However, some printers are "factory calibrated" and expect you to deliver the data in a particular profile - e.g., sRGB. 
Moreover, there are configuration options to allow you to choose where to do color management during printing.  Photoshop, for example, provides a Color Management section in their Print dialog, and if you drill down to the printer driver's dialogs you may find that there are settings there as well.  You'll need to discover the best combination of these settings for your particular print needs.  Some combinations may work equally well, while you may find some have subtle advantages.  Not long ago I did a whole series of prints in which I manipulated the settings to go through all the different combinations with my HP printer, then critically compared the results.  I found that instructing Photoshop to do a conversion to the print driver's standard sRGB input profile, and disabling color management in the print drivers entirely gave me the best results.
Summary
At the end of the day we're doing all this because: You'd like to be able to work on a document, print it and have the colors look as you expect, publish it online and have most people see it as you intended, and send it to others and have them see it as you did.
No conclusions or direct advice here; I'm just giving you some things to think about when making your color-management choices.
-Noel