Calibrating Laptop (Vortex IV) screen for Photography?

andbro

Member
Hi,

I just bought a Vortex IV mainly for editing photos at a cost of £1400 and so far have not been that happy with the overall colour/contrast and look of the screen. In particular the skin tones are not great and pictures look to lack contrast overall.

Does anyone have suggestions of how best to calibrate the screen or generally improve it? I went for the matte option but starting to wonder whether glossy may have been better (nevermind - too late now!).

It's fast at processing in lightroom and when I plug it into an external monitor/tv it looks great, so it appears to be the screen that is the issue.

Any help much appreciated!

Andrew
 

SmokeDarKnight

Author Level
Hello Andbro,

Ill have a look tonight when i get home, there is an option somewhere that lets you select and tinker with the color scheme but i cant remember where it is off hand sorry, I'll have a look when i get back from Uni tonight at 9 if someone else doesn't get back to you.
 

andbro

Member
Thanks for the replies. I've found the option to change settings in the Intel HD Graphics panel (although my Laptop also has an AMD 8970 4Gb graphics card, but there doesn't seem to be many options for changin the display settings in the AMD Catalyst centre).

Does anyone have any tips on how to calibrate or software which enables more settings to be changed? I know you can buy a specialist calibration software/hadrware but don't really fancy spending any more cash!

At the most basic level I guess holding a printed photo next to the original and chenging setting to look like it may work!

EDIT:

Have just found a link to ICC profiling - does anyone know what the screen is/profile is/used this before? Looks like a good way to calibrate without additional hardware!

http://pcmonitors.info/articles/using-icc-profiles-in-windows

Thanks
 
Last edited:
Thanks for the replies. I've found the option to change settings in the Intel HD Graphics panel (although my Laptop also has an AMD 8970 4Gb graphics card, but there doesn't seem to be many options for changin the display settings in the AMD Catalyst centre).

Does anyone have any tips on how to calibrate or software which enables more settings to be changed? I know you can buy a specialist calibration software/hadrware but don't really fancy spending any more cash!

At the most basic level I guess holding a printed photo next to the original and chenging setting to look like it may work!

EDIT:

Have just found a link to ICC profiling - does anyone know what the screen is/profile is/used this before? Looks like a good way to calibrate without additional hardware!

http://pcmonitors.info/articles/using-icc-profiles-in-windows

Thanks

I have a device called the I1 display. http://www.xrite.com/i1display-pro I once tried this on my older laptop which I owned before getting a PCS desktop and I guess it worked. The major problem is that my old monitor wasn't IPS, so having it tilted in front of me produced not only a shift in the calibrated contrast but also colour as well; the bottom of my screen was a dark brown hue whilst the upper part was neutral.

I invested in an ultrasharp Dell monitor with IPS and 100% sRGB colour gammut and the callibrations were spot on.

ICC profile "simulates" or instructs a computer how to shift colours for an intended output. It is not used to callibrate colour as such. Things like physical prints before they're printed, is most common.

Since I callibrated the colours on my monitor (so black is black and grey is grey and white is white, not black is blue and so forth) and then used photoshop to soft proof the output files with an ICC profile, the "simulation" of output is more accurate than ever because there are no colour shifts with an uncallibrated monitor.

Using the i1 display creates the ICC profile of the callibration so that windows software can recognise it later and display it. I suggest that if you want to get into some serious colour critical work then get an i1 display pro and a good IPS monitor with more than 95% RGB gammut. However there's nothing stopping you from callibrating your laptop's display; the external ISP monitor is just much more sophisticated and appropriate. Hope all this helps.
 
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