From A Different Angle

So I promised to do a side-by-side.
Here you go:
Top image -> laptop, uncalibrated, crappy, 13″ glossy worthless piece of sh!t
Bottom image -> desktop, calibrated, 27″ matte sweet widescreen

D700, ISO200, 30 sec @ f/5.6, Nikkor 50mm, off-camera SB-800 (flashed manually several times on the mushrooms near the end of the 30 second exposure)

Same as above, but the post-processing was a bit better 😉

Of course you can argue that I could’ve tried harder and got the same result on the laptop, but there’s only so much you can actually see on a piece of sh!t which isn’t made for this kind of work. I tried desaturating the road (primarily red and yellow channels) on the laptop (just like I did on the desktop), and all I got was a load of banding and other unwanted ugly side effects. It just didn’t work.
It may not have been mainly the calibration problem, but also the fact that this screen can’t handle all these colors… Owwell, anyway… The difference is here, and obvious (and yes, I know, if I spend a bucketful of money I can get a very expensive laptop which can handle the colors, but that’s beside the point right now 😉 ).