Can a RAW image have a colour profile straight from camera?

Question

I am totally confused after having read a host of apparently contradictory materials. If I shoor RAW images, can they already have a particular colour profile imposed on them by the camera? Does not RAW mean 'no profile before being processed by software outside the camera'?
I have a Canon Powershot G11 camera. JPEGs are always recorded with sRGB profile in this camera. But after some e-mail correspondence with the Canon technical enquiry department, they have told me that the RAW images are also recorded with sRGB profile, i.e they already have that profile as they come out of the camera and before they are processed by the Adobe DNG Converter and ACR. Can this be right?
Thanks very much in anticipation of a simple answer!

Answer 1

Usually cameras don't embed profiles, rather they include a simple tag in the exif data "hidden" within the raw file.  This can be used by manufacturer's software for default rendering, but has no effect upon the actual raw image data.  This is also done with jpeg output, although of course the camera has rendered the image into either sRGB or Adobe1998 depending upon the camera settings.
I generally set Photoshop to ignore exif colorspace tags (File Handling within Preferences), only want to honor a profile if is actually present.  Therefore I always set my camera to sRGB so that on the rare occasions I shoot in jpeg I won't have the wrong colorspace in use.  Of course for ACR the camera colorspace makes no difference, since the output colorspace is chosen within ACR, no attention is paid (for raw) to the exif tag.  I use ProPhoto for most work in ACR/Photoshop to avoid channel clipping.
Richard Southworth