Recommend High Powered Laptop for Ps beta, Adobe Substance & Boris FX Apps Use

Don't expect too much from a laptop screen! There's no way a laptop lid a few mm thick can contain a high-grade display. That's just physics. It may be "good" or "adequate" as long as you can work around the shortcomings, but if you really care about color you need an external desktop monitor, and a fairly expensive one at that.

Panel uniformity, both in brightness and color, is where most displays fall short, and as Conrad points out - they get away with it because it's not in the specs.

There is no such thing as "factory calibration". That's just marketing fluff. Calibration is only meaningful if you can set the appropriate parameters for white point and black point. If your work is intended for print this is where you match on screen preview to printed output. If your work is for screen only, you still need to decide what screen viewing environment you're targeting. For practical purposes, excluding HDR, those two are often the same. You need to buy a calibrator, and if it's a wide gamut screen, it's mandatory.

As for the GPU, a recurrent problem with laptops is conflicting dual GPUs. It sounds like a good idea, but Photoshop uses the GPU for data processing, it's not just a simple one-way downstream flow that can be redirected at random. There can only be one GPU in that equation. You can't send data to one GPU and get it back from the other. In short - you may need to completely disable the integrated GPU.

Another inherent shortcoming with laptops is disk space. How much do you want to rely on external drives dangling at the end of flimsy cables? You need to have enough free space on the system drive for the Photoshop scratch disk, somewhere between 250 and 500 GB, sometimes more if you work with particularly big files.

Remember that you cannot work directly off external drives. Or you can, but it will be very slow, and the risk of file corruption is pretty high.

Disclosure: I'm not a Mac fan, but I have to say I'm not particularly thrilled with laptops either. There are too many potential shortcomings. One that I haven't mentioned is the amount of modifications and add-ons the laptop manufacturers fill their machines up with. This is where they can put their stamp on the product, and that's exactly what they do. Most of that is just in the way and cause problems. The more of that you can uninstall and disable, the better.

Just some general comments, because I don't know what the best model would be. (I use a Mac, but you do so much 3D that a PC with an Nvidia GPU should be better in your case.) I can comment on the color question. Also, my reply below is not just about that model, but how to think through display color in general.

Looking at what’s on the MSI website, the MSI Raider GE78HX is clearly a gaming laptop. By that I mean they have prioritized GPU performance over everything else including power efficiency. Which is fine for 3D and AI, but the first thing I would do is turn off those external RGB lights that would mess with color perception when editing color.

…also full RGB for my image processing.…full gamut support for RGB (the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen9 doesn't offer this)

By @Fotomaker01RA

“full RGB” is an incomplete requirement that isn’t useful. Taken literally, “full RGB” is impossible because the true full range of RGB includes many colors that can’t be printed or displayed on current monitors, and some colors that can’t be seen with the human eye. What you are actually looking for is full coverage of a specific standard RGB gamut, all of which are much smaller than full theoretical RGB. These three gamuts are widely used:

sRGB. Very standard, but very limited.

Display P3 and Adobe RGB. Both much larger than sRGB, so they’re both called “wide gamut.” But they’re different in the 3D volumes they cover. Each covers some color ranges that the other doesn’t.

So, you need to know which one of those RGB gamuts you need “full” coverage of.

The MSI Raider GE78HX is so gamer-oriented that the MSI website spec sheet doesn’t mention what RGB color gamut it covers, since gamers don’t care. It links to a review on notebookcheck which seems like a good website, and they do have a much better commentary on color reproduction. The image below is a screen shot from that review:

What does it mean?

The “Distribution of brightness” graphic is about uniformity, which is rarely on a spec sheet. It shows how much brightness varies from corner to corner. A pro graphics display should have as little variation as possible. If the variation is large, you might for example lighten an area of an image unnecessarily because you thought it was too dark, when in reality the image was fine but the display was too dark in that corner, misleading you.

In the chart on the right…

Average (luminance): 384.4 nits. This is good, but if you’re going to edit with Adobe HDR features (in Camera Raw and Lightroom) that would require 1000 nits sustained (the DisplayHDR 1000 standard). If you aren’t going to edit in HDR, or if all your work goes to print, then 384 nits is a little brighter than average and is fine.

∆E Color: 4.05, calibrated 1.02. ∆E or Delta E is a measure of color accuracy. You want it to be below 3; pro color displays can get below 1. This means the GE78HX is not great out of the box, but if you calibrate it you can get it down to about 1.

Now we get to the color gamuts. It says its coverage of industry standard RGB gamuts is:

Adobe RGB: 86.5%

Display P3: 97.6%

sRGB: 99.9%

I would interpret that to mean the panel is probably Display P3 since it covers most of that and not as much of Adobe RGB. It says 99.9% sRGB because both Display P3 and Adobe RGB are so much larger than sRGB that each covers practically all of sRGB. But it might not be 100% because there might be a tiny bit of the sRGB 3D volume that sticks out beyond the other two gamuts, probably in a specific luminance range. You’ll probably never notice that.

Supporting that is this quote from the notebookcheck review:

The display is set to P3 colors out of the box by default. While color accuracy isn't bad, the model is not calibrated at factory unlike on the MSI Creator series. We recommend applying our calibrated ICM profile above to get more accurate colors from the panel especially since it covers sRGB and P3 entirely. We're able to bring down the average grayscale and color DeltaE values to just 2 and 1.02, respectively, with our X-Rite colorimeter.

The display is not color-calibrated at the factory, so to make it perform its best you need to know how to run a proper calibration, or at least generate a profile, using an appropriate calibration/profiling device (like something from the Calibrite Display line). Other parts of the review say it’s a power-hungry and noisy beast, in case that is a concern. The other takeaway is that for a better display out of the box, maybe something from the MSI Creator/Creator Pro series would be better?

Something else in the review that would make me reject that laptop is where it says

…MSI advertises Power Delivery but we are unable to get this working as well. Our unit would not recharge via USB-C no matter which port or how many USB-C adapters we tested.

That bothers me because I currently rely on USB-C Power Delivery so that I can use any brand of power adapter or power bank I have, including the USB-C PD power on a dock, and they all work with my laptop as long as the USB-C PD port supplies at least 60 watts. A laptop that doesn’t properly support USB-C PD in this day and age is unacceptable (to me).

Also, if you want to get comparisons to other laptops, read that full notebookcheck review because it talks about that. Rtings is another good site that actually measures color coverage, uniformity, and accuracy of displays, and I think they also compare to other models.