J O H N  A L L A N wrote:
Not positive (you should check), but I believe the Dell Inspirion notebooks just have an old TFT panel (as opposed to an IPS panel). They are difficult to calibrate and aren't really meant for photo work.

Thank you, I think my best bet at this point will be to get my brother's desktop up and running. He had shelled out a pretty penny for a very nice Asus monitor... I might actually be able to connect it to my laptop...

GRMACK wrote:
This is tough.  Color management is a whole big mess.

Even when I send some photo to several different labs they all have their own interpretations too and they all look different.  Send in for a reprint and it looks different than last one.  Different eyes I guess, but it is maddening!  Kodak, back in film era, had control strips that labs used for setting up a standard or reference, but digital is open to too many variables.  So I print myself now.

X-rite has a lot of good webinars that can get you close, but you have to get a tighter control over your work too.  You might have to invest in something like their "i1 Display Pro" and its software and make a profile for your Dell setup.  Dell has different ideas on what is right too.

I'd stay away from the Spyder calibrators which are cheaper. Imho.  They don't seem close to what you seek over x-rite's gear.  I have 2-3 Spyders, but they are all now retired having use the x-rite stuff.  See this where the guy uses a JETI radiometer to determine which is better: x-rite or Spyder (Fwiw, The Spyder 5 is much better then 3 or 4, but x-rite is still better:  http://forum.luminous-landscape.com/ind … c=107619.0

Good luck, but need to be aware that no two devices will agree.  Apple seems to be consumerzing their gear to play better with their phones than being geared towards pros from my last LA class.  Use a Retina and it will look different and more contrasty, colorful, etc. than what you see on a Windows machine.  Then we have 4K vs. 5K now too which helps in sharpness, but other things like shadow detail and even a color match go out the window.  Not to mention that some outputs from a computer to an external monitor may have restriction on the RGB space down to RGB=16-235 over what should be RGB=0-255.  Pictus on here mentioned that tidbit last week and I found it was still true on my Nvidia by default.  Thank you Nvidia!

And don't get me started with the new YCbCr444 protocols over RGB either coming out of a HDMI port to an external monitor either!

Good luck!

Thank you! I will eventually (hopefully) figure this out but gee wiz this is a learning curve!

Julia A Campbell wrote:
Thank you! I will eventually (hopefully) figure this out but gee wiz this is a learning curve!

haha!

Even two competing softwares opened on the same screen side-by-side will look different even if opened in same sRGB color space which most all monitors should handle.  Even then, different Kelvin temps and tints too reported by all these various softwares too.  Maddening!  So who is really right?

You can get close, but exact is pot-luck at times.  Give it to someone else and they get back with: "What's with the orange skin?" - or Martian green skin in the case of my parents.  Ugh!