What are you using to calibrate your monitor and create its profile?

I think you have grasped the concept:

An image’s profile determines how a certain combination or RGB-values is supposed to appear and Photoshop uses the monitor profile to determine what values it needs to pass on to get that appearance or an approximation on the screen.

If you softproof with the monitor profile you are effectively circumventing Color Management and the RGB-values are desplayed directly, so to speak.

Gator soup, you should really try to use proper and accurate terminology.

Photoshop transforms color values from documents to devices based on the color profiles that describe the two.

Photoshop has a menu in which you can convert the color values from one document profile to another.  There's some relationship between the two, but if you use the word "convert" to describe what happens to colors on the way to a monitor I suspect you'll just confuse people.

And experience has shown us that a complete understanding of color-management cannot be taught via forum posts.

-Noel

No, you don't understand correctly. Read Chris Cox answer over and over again until you know what it means.

Noel Carboni wrote:

 

I guess I should just not say anything in color-management threads.  Sorry.  My fault for trying to help.

 

-Noel

suit yourself

That sounds like an invitation to continue to talk about the issue.  Fair enough.

I'm not sure where you're getting "insecurity"...  I am just trying to help you help others more effectively.

I invite you to re-read just the first sentence of what you wrote very carefully, putting yourself in the shoes of someone struggling with both the terminology and the concepts:

Photoshop (CMS) reads an embedded ICC profile and CONVERTS it to the custom monitor profile for a theoretical 'true color' display

• Think about what "Photoshop (CMS)" might mean to a person who doesn't know the acronym might stand for "Color Management System" (which is I assume what you meant).  Adobe themselves don't call it "CMS", they use the acronym "CMM" (Color Management Module).  The term "CMS" is used in the computer industry for about a dozen different things.

• While a color profile might have been embedded in an image file before it was opened by Photoshop, Photoshop works on documents.  A profile is not "embedded" in a document, it is maintained by Photoshop with the document and describes the color values in the document.  If Photoshop opens a document without an embedded profile, depending on settings and user choices it might assign a profile or it might even operate on the document without color-management.  Oversimplification doesn't help people when they're trying to learn new things unless it's described as such, for example, "This is a bit of an oversimplification..." or "Generally speaking..."

• Not every monitor profile is a "custom monitor profile".  Quite often a standard profile (e.g., sRGB IEC61966-2.1) is associated with a monitor by the operating system as a default, or a factory profile is installed by a driver package or system update.  Your use of the term "custom" is a bit ambiguous and could be read as implying the creation of a profile using a calibration and profiling device specific to the particular monitor.

• Photoshop's color management code does not convert an embedded ICC profile at all (read carefully what you wrote).  As I said, it transforms color values.  That was the key error in your description that prompted me to comment.

If ever there is a time to pick words carefully, it's in a color-management discussion.

-Noel