Good laptop for Photoshop and Lightroom

[Jim Walczak]

How do you adjust colors on laptop so they are accurate? Do different type screens do better than others? recommendations?

I haven't tried this as again I don't do my own editing on a laptop, however I suspect it would essentially be the same as calibrating any other monitor...use a colorimeter. I use a Spider 3 myself...it's a bit older at this point (I think the Spider 4's have been out for a while now) and I suspect there are probably better/more expensive brands out there, but for me, it does a pretty decent job. If you haven't used one of these, essentially it's a piece of hardware that you plug into your computer and place against your screen...it "reads" the colors as they're displayed, makes appropriate adjustments for accurate color and sets those adjustments to a color profile for your system. Pretty straight forward to use.

As far as to whether different screen types "do better" than others, the best answer I can give you is yes, no and sort of, LOL! Personally I find computer monitors to be just a tad subjective when it comes to editing images (not to mention my video and animation work). Personally I was rather stubborn about upgrading to an LCD monitor...I had used a Philips 19" CRT for the longest time (still have it hooked up as a secondary...which I'll explain in just a minute) and I was quite happy with it. A number of years back I had gotten my wife a 21" LCD flat screen for her computer...as a programmer and applications developer, she had used them at work for quite a while, however here at home she was still using a 15" CRT, so I finally broke down and get her the LCD. She LOVED it, but for the longest time I really just wasn't crazy about it at all. I main reason I finally broke down and got the 24" that I'm still using now is because when I went back to college in 2009 for art and graphics design, all the Mac labs were of course using flat screens, so I wanted something fairly comparable for my PC so that my "homework" would be relatively consistent....i.e. so the work I was doing here at home looked more or less the same at school (and vice-versa). Here some 6 odd years later, I do like my 24" LCD, but the truth is that it took me a LOOOOOONG time to get used to it. Even now LCD and plasma displays tend to drive my eyes a little buggy after a while.

Now in terms of "accurate color", there's a couple of other things I do feel compelled to mention. The simple fact of the matter is that with computers, there's a lot more to color than meets the eye (literally). For example, you can have a monitor that's absolutely perfectly calibrated, however your browser for example may use a slightly different color profile so that what you see in Photoshop may NOT look absolutely identical to what you see in Firefox (or IE, Safari, Opera, etc). There's also the issue of color profiles in Photoshop...RGB and "Adobe RGB" are two different things and it CAN affect how your images look. Further, if you do any physical prints of any kind, the color profile of the printing device must also be considered. Epson inkjets for example...while Epson uses an RGB color profile, their idea of "RGB" is vastly different from the rest of the world, LOL! For example, if you compare a print that was done on certain Epsons for example with the same print done on an HP, you'll likely find that the Epson prints tend to lean much more towards the reds and browns. I use an Epson Workforce 1100 here at home and I have access to a 24" Epson up at the college...because of this inconsistency with the Epson color profiles, I have that old Philips 19" CRT setup specifically to work with the Epson printers. The same goes for a lot of places that do photo prints as well...I don't know about other parts of the world, however here in Northern Ohio, I have to tell the lab folks to turn OFF the auto adjustments on their equipment, otherwise my colors can get all screwy!

Then of course, there's also the issue of "ambient light". For example, take an average laptop outside and try to look at a few images on a bright sunny day, then look at the same images in a darkened room. The laptops monitor is obviously displaying them the same way, but they tend to look vastly different to the human eye...on a bright sunny day, the images will most likely look washed out, assuming you can even see them at all. Needless to say, this will affect how your images look while you're editing.

In short, an accurately calibrated monitor, laptop or otherwise, is only part of the equation.

Now that all said, there is one last thing I have to add here...this is just my own personal opinion, so please use it as you will, however I think that a lot of people tend to get WAY to hung up on this concept of "accurate colors". Color in and of itself is a rather subjective thing as it's based on "perception"...no 2 people really see this thing we call color exactly the same way. Just to make this easy, consider a young person in their mid teens vs. an older person in their late 60's/early 70's. Show a random image to the young person and they may say the colors look a little flat and dull, where as the older person may say that same image is actually OVER saturated or simply too bright. You could of course consider the old analogy of how you would explain "red" to a person who's been blind their entire life...you get my point. Very simply, I've seen people who drive themselves absolutely bonkers trying to get "perfect" color...from the camera, to their editing monitor to their prints, they want everything to look EXACTLY the way they remember the scene. But here's the rub...human memory is faulty as best with such things and light can certainly change from one moment to the next...consider a sunrise/sunset vs. mid afternoon light...just NOT the same thing. Personally my goal is to never try and reproduce light and color "exactly" the way I saw it, as much as what simply looks natural. For example, let's say that I have an image in Photoshop and I bump the saturation up or down by +/- 5...what happens? Does the sky come crashing down? Do the world stock markets fly into a tail spin? Do penguins in the arctic start walking backwards?? Again...you get my point. Personally my goal is always the final print...whether it's physical or simply something I post on Facebook. If THAT looks natural, it really doesn't matter what I captured with the camera. In other words, yes, accurate color IS important, but don't get your shorts in a knot over it .

Okies...just my own opinions as always, but I hope that helped!