COVID-19 Work from home: how to make your webcam look good

[Music] now that we're all working from home during this crazy pandemic wouldn't it be nice if your webcam actually looked good we all have so many meetings and the only personal touch that you can give to your meeting is actually turning on your camera but if your camera looks like it's kind of silly right imagine you talk to a client or you might actually need to do a job interview because you're lost your job over Corona you might want to look a bit more professional it's kind of like getting your foot in the door and then once it's in it's all about what you say of course but at least your face looks good in this video I'll give you some really simple tips you can do in like two minutes and without any technical knowledge that can make your webcam look dramatically better so this down there that's my welcome that's not bad right it actually looks kind of good of course I scaled it down quite a bit so it's a it seems a bit more sharp also but on top of that I gave it the right circumstances to actually picture me well the first and foremost most important thing you have to give your camera to make it look good is light light is everything so in my case you see a bit of fancy light behind me you don't need that that's just for me because I like it the most important part is actually the light that's in front of me here I have a big lamp that illuminates my face so the camera can really find my face and show it to you the camera has like a super super tiny lens and a super teeny tiny sensor and so it just needs a bunch of light to actually make you look good the one big no-no is not sitting in with a big window behind you for example because if the sunlight is strong the camera doesn't get the light for your face it's gets the light from behind and it has a lot of trouble with exposure and focusing and all of that stuff so make sure to close the curtains or just don't sit in front of a big win next one is don't turn on the ceiling lights the ceiling light points down and it's meant to illuminate the whole room and because it's from the top it creates shadows on your face and it makes you look like a movie villain and that's not really a look you want to be going for so the best scenario is to put a big light like I have on my face so the camera can capture me if you don't have that which is fine just sit in front of a window so basically the Sun illuminates your face and then the camera has as much chance as possible to actually make you look good let's talk about settings for a little bit most of you likely have a laptop with a built-in face camp I expect that out of the box there are no settings applications for those I know they do exist and you can download them but if you don't want to bother don't do it but potentially you can make your camp look slightly better if you have those settings and so on the screen here you can actually see one of those settings panels that comes in Windows um just to keep it simple don't touch most of them because they will screw up your webcam but what you can do is work on brightness contrast saturation sharpness and white balance all the rest just don't touch them and so brightness clearly just makes your camera brighter like in my case actually a bit less bright might be nicer contrast well you can see it fills out the darkness a lot in my case it's not really needed where the I just keep it at the default and then white balance sometimes this one is interesting because if you have sunlight on you or you might have a normal Philips light bulb on you the camera captures the light differently then you see it yourself so you might want to change this toggle to change the tone of your webcam so now I made it more yellow and then when I go down I make it more blue so for me I found a nice one I just always keep it at this with dead light condition and it's go so this is a little bit more as but if you wanted to you can change the settings for a better look alright so before we go into the fun stuff that you see on your screen right now because there has to be a place for that as well while working from home I want to please tell you to not use the default settings or blurring your background or doing some stuff to your face in the apps that you use for chatting so I know that Skype and Microsoft themes actually try to blur your background a little bit and maybe soon will enhance your skin tone and stuff like that try turning all that stuff off because it's actually kind of bad it doesn't make it look good actually the one from teams that actually blurs your background blurs it a lot it actually makes you look like a douche tree honestly it's pretty bad so turn that stuff off and instead experiment yourself because there's also a place for some fun stuff like look at the screen right now I'm actually using an application for snapchat filters so now that you have your light in place your camera looks good you can be professional you can also play a little bit and so these kind of applications are basically in-between the signal of your webcam and your chat application so they are here in between they can apply some stuff to the feed of your camera so it's good fun but basically you can turn on this app add some filters and then in your chat application go to your settings and say my webcam is actually not my Logitech or my whatever webcam I have no my webcam is that application that I just used so in this guitar in this case it's the snap camera so if you are well lit you can do a lot of fun stuff right I can actually look like a girl and because my light is so good it really tracks it's like it's me alright there's now I'm a baby or I can do or I can do so many things this is just too much fun or I cannot do a hair color because I don't have the hair but you can do like the googly eyes and like so sometimes in your daily meetings like oh this is this one is so cute yeah like you know sometimes you might want to have some fun if you have so many meetings with the same people all the time like I do this is good stuff right it just opens up and you know the fun thing is we have a lot of like after work drinks with a lot of people in soon let's say but all these people have their children on their lap because it's the end of the day the kids have been at home and so when people have filters like these we are actually entertain other people's kids and that's been a blast to be honest right we have to find some fun stuff to do also while we're working hard from home that is all ladies and gentleman actually that was pretty easy right you kind of just have to put a light in the right place namely behind your camera illuminating your face turn off the ceiling light and don't sit in front of a big light source behind you that's all um you can of course do a lot more you can fiddle with settings and tweak stuff but actually if you didn't do that and you had the light set up properly that's kind of enough so I hope this has helped you in these hard times of lockdown and people getting sick please stay safe wash your hands and stay inside [Music]