Expert advice needed re. Colour Management

[AKMac]

Can someone please save me time and frustration by giving me sound advice on setting up my home computer with photoshop and a monitor.
My setup is as follows:-
MacBook Pro 13" (OS X 10.6.7)
Adobe Photoshop (CS3)
NEC MultiSync PA241W (Europe)
I have Spyder Elite 3.
I have NEC Multiprofiler software.
At present, the colour of Photoshop images viewed on the laptop and on the NEC are very different.
I am not a beginner, but my knowledge of colour management has long since evaporated, and I don't want to spend time reading up on it - I want to spend time being creative. Colour accuracy is of paramount importance in my work.

I am hoping to elicit advice from some of the experts.

[mistermonday]

AKMac, this might be a good start for you.
http://computer-darkroom.com/ps12_colour/ps12_1.htm
Regards, Murray

[andrewrodney]

You’ve got an awesome display system (NEC), the two big issues is proper display calibration to match the prints. see:http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tu...too_dark.shtml
Forget the laptop matching or being very useful here when you have the NEC. They are vastly different in terms of quality and gamut, they just will never match. The 2nd big issue is having good output profiles and properly setting up a soft proof. See:http://www.ppmag.com/reviews/200409_rodneycm.pdf
http://www.ppmag.com/reviews/200411_rodneycm.pdf
http://www.ppmag.com/reviews/200410_rodneycm.pdf

[AKMac]

Thanks to you both, Murray and Andrew, for the very helpful information.

I did expect that trying to get the 13" laptop screen to produce anything even approximately similar to the NEC display was wishful thinking, but I have to say I am surprised that there is SUCH a dramatic difference. Daylight white skin tones as shown on the NEC are presented as grossly red/pink and oversaturated on the MacBook display, even after having calibrated it with Spyder3.

Anyway I suppose you get what you pay for.

Thanks again for the help.

A K

[AKMac]

Apologies to MacBook

I had the NEC display set up wrongly - contrary to what I previously said, the display on the MacBook is not too bad after all.