I sent a JPG with colorspace AdobeRGB1998 to myself via an email and it came back looking the same!

Question

What happened? I was taught that the internet uses sRGB and so my returned JPG should have had the muted colors, same as Assigning a JPG to sRGB has. What am i missing?

Answer 1

Color-management is all about getting the most accurate view of the colors that you can so that you're viewing them as intended.
In an ideal world with ideal computers, every image would contain all the information needed to fully describe the colors in it, and every system would display those colors accurately in every application.
We're still kind of a long way off from that utopia, though every day things get a little better.
There are two schools of thought:
1.  Casual users can be perfectly happy when red things look red and blue things look blue, but the colors may not be accurate at a subtle level.  In this case, it can be possible to get many applications to match one another in the appearance of the images displayed on the same system, so things seem more consistent.
2.  Professional or picky users may prefer to take the time to fully understand color-management, and calibrate and profile their systems, so that they can be sure what they're seeing is more accurate.
In practical terms, it can actually seem counter-intuitive to the first group that after having spent money on devices to calibrate and profile a system, that Photoshop now displays things differently than other applications, which may display things differently than one another.
Here are two possible scenarios, to illustrate this further:
1. A typical user has a monitor with a more or less standard color gamut and not hugely different from sRGB.  So if this user both edits images in the sRGB profile, and has the sRGB profile associated with (and thus describing the characteristics of) the monitor, which is the Windows default, the following plays out...  When the user displays an sRGB image:
A color transform by Photoshop from the image color space to the monitor color space does nothing (as both are identical), and the R,G,B pixel values from the image are sent to the monitor as is.  The monitor does a passable, though possibly inaccurate, job of displaying the image.
Internet Explorer 9, which always does transforms from image color space to sRGB (regardless of monitor profile), also does nothing, so the image looks the same as in Photoshop.
A non-color-managed application (e.g., IrfanView with Color Management turned off for speed) does no color management transforms by definition, so R,G,B values are just sent to the monitor and the image looks the same as above.  Earlier versions of IE and other earlier browsers do no color management and fall into this category as well.
An application that's supposed to be fully color-managed, but which has bugs (e.g., some versions of Firefox) or may not understand all variants of color profiles, very likely DOES work properly with the sRGB profile, since it's the default on Windows and is well formed, and thus displays an sRGB image with no transform, and it looks the same as in all the above cases.
An image expressed in a color space OTHER THAN sRGB will be inaccurately displayed by a non-color-managed application, but the color will only be as inaccurate as in all the above cases (because the monitor does not perfectly display sRGB) in properly functioning color-managed applications.
See the pattern in the above?  Consistency.
2.  Users seeking the most accurate possible color in their color-managed applications might choose high-end wide-gamut monitors (though even cheap monitors nowadays are starting to have wide gamuts), and might also purchase devices for calibrating and profiling their display(s) and printer(s).  What they then experience is this:
Photoshop and other fully color-managed applications will display their images, regardless of color space, accurately.  A particular tone of red will be just that tone, and this will be true no matter what color space the image uses.
Internet Explorer 9 will transform images from whatever color space to sRGB, so it will ALWAYS be inaccurate.   How inaccurate depends on how different the actual monitor characteristics are from sRGB.
Non-color-managed applications will just display images without transform, so they'll be inaccurate depending on how different the image color profile is from the monitor's characteristics.  Images could end up looking oversaturated on a wide-gamut monitor.
The color profile produced by the profiling software may not be perfectly well understood by all color-managed applications, leading to very strange displays.
Folks in this category understand when to expect differences, and are ready to work out problems so that they get accurate color from the applications they expect to be fully color-managed.  They may avoid Internet Explorer and use Firefox or Safari instead so that they see accurate color from their browsers as well.  Given all this, in the applications (like Photoshop) that matter to them, they can make use of the entire color gamut of their monitors and printers, and can convert to sRGB for web publishing as needed.
There is no easy answer as to which group is "better" to be in.  It depends on your needs and expectations, and it's actually even possible to try to straddle the fence some, with a compromise between the above extremes.
I realize this may have raised more questions than it answered, but that is the nature of color-management.  I encourage you to read all you can until it finally starts to click.  Then you can make intelligent choices about which paths to take.
-Noel