Color and reality

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about color recently.  Not because I particularly want to, but because it’s been giving me some major headaches.  The problem I’m having is figuring out what is “real”.

For example, let’s say I take a photo of something with a digital camera.  I transfer that photo over to my computer and then put it on my website.  The problem arises when I compare the images in various ways:  on the camera’s LCD, in Photoshop, in Safari, in Firefox, in iPhoto, or on a PC — it never looks the same twice.  I know this has to do with color profiles and whether the software you’re using pays any attention to it.  For example, Safari pays attention to color profiles, while Firefox (by default) does not.

And here’s something else I don’t really understand.  My monitor is calibrated, so why should there be so much of a difference between sRGB and “monitor color”?

At some point I start to wonder: what did this object I photographed actually look like?   I get so caught up with the differences that sometimes I can’t remember.