Damien Symonds

Ok, that's a bit better. Still not great, but out of the danger zone at least. I encourage you to run Glary on both computers when you get a chance, and maybe Scanner too. When you have time.

Truly, it's amazing your computer even starts up. This is very very very bad.

Holy crap!!! PLEASE tell me this is a typo??????

So that we may be thorough with our analysis, can you also do this for me?

Ok. That firms my conviction that this is something to do with the PremierColor. If you can find how the settings differ, and make Cara's match yours, you'll (hopefully) find that Cara's computer calibrates properly. If this is the case, it might be also true that you get to hang on to your Spyder 3 for a bit longer

Great! Chrome is completely shithouse, and we need a shithouse browser for this test. I want to know, when you both open the exact same web page, whether they look wildly different in colour. (Or whether this problem is restricted only to Adobe programs.)

Which web browser do you both use?

Gosh, how bizarre. So somehow you've turned something off, or Cara has turned something on ... or vice versa. If there is a Dell PremierColor control panel on both computers, you need to examine the settings and see how they differ, I reckon.

How weird. In between "Night light settings" and "Scale and layout" there should be a "Colour profile" section. Does Cara's have the "Colour profile" section?

Hang on ... can you choose this for me? Then show me a screenshot of the window that opens?

For early Christmas, about the 16th. But let's hope we can get this sorted before then. Is yours set exactly like this too?

Just to confirm - when you copied your profile over to Cara's computer, you replaced her Spyder profile with yours, yes? There aren't two Spyder profiles on her computer now, are there?

And is your computer set to "Vibrant (Full)" as well?

If you choose "Display Settings" (just below the Dell PremierColor setting) what does it tell you the profile is?

Can you show me a screenshot of that?

In that case, you'll need to do this: https://www.damiensymonds.net/art_vista.html

Well, let's not get ahead of ourselves. First, let me know what happens with this profile-transfer experiment.

Great. So copy that, and paste it into the same folder in Cara's computer. Then restart Cara's computer. When you've restarted, you should go to the "Color Management" control panel in Windows. That control panel should open on the "Devices" tab by default, and the "Display" should be the chosen device. Then you can look down and check that the Spyder profile says "(default)" beside it. If so, you can start to play with files and see how they look.

Right. But probably only one called "Spyder"?

Not a dumb question at all. Your profile should be in this folder: C:\Windows\System32\spool\drivers\color Can you check?

Hmmm ... it's actually quite lucky that the S3E even works on one of the computers. It's very old tech, and your computers are very new tech. Have you tried copying the profile from your computer to Cara's? It's not an actual solution, but if it helped at least to a degree, it would give us some clues as to how to proceed.

Hi Amanda! Hope you've been getting some rain up there. Remind me which Spyder you have?

That's more like it.

That doesn't look quite how I expected. Are you sure you have the layer blend mode on "Color"?

Oh, phew! So now just invert the mask of that layer, then paint on to the problem areas with a 5% white brush.