How to make your webcam look great!

webcams kind of suck in this video I'll show you how to go from this do this pretty cool right let's talk about why webcams kind of suck and why even the most expensive webcams create a math result the problem is the form factor you can see the webcam is a very small device because it's so small it has a very small image sensor an image sensor is the part of the camera that captures the light and then produces the image or the video real cameras generally have a 35-millimeter image sensor this is like the golden standard of reference of the size of an image sensor webcams however have a much smaller image sensor because there are such small devices but let's have a look at what this difference actually results in so when you have a look at this image this is the 35 millimeter film reference point and this is the output of that image so it captures a whole bunch of data and a lot of light so now when you have a look at the small square here this is the image sensor of the webcam so the difference between the 35 millimeter film and the one from a webcam we call the crop factor so for webcam generally this crop factor is like 7 or 7.2 something like this as you can see this produces a very soon in image and this is the issue of the webcam form factor so they found a clever way to get around this without this clever trick that they came up with basically a webcam would be looking up my nose right now that's how soothing it is like a normal 18 millimeter lens or an SLR camera is the equivalent of like a hundred 26 millimeters for such a small image sensor so what they need to do is zoom out so to cover the distance that a webcam is normally from your face like around 40 centimeters or two feet it actually needs to zoom out by a whole lot and to do that is to use a fisheye lens so a fisheye lens will actually zoom out and then you it would see more of the image and then they just crop it so it looks like a 76 degree angle out of the camera they would just crop it to make the image look good however when you go to such lengths to zoom out and zoom in and do all of this stuff the image quality just goes down and down and also the small image sensor has a lot less possibility to to catch the light so there's not much exposure there's also not much depth of field so this is why webcams kind of suck but I have a way to at least make it look a little bit better because what you're looking at right now is just my webcam with a bunch of good light a bit of settings tweaking and it's kind of passable it's not the best but it's fine whoa this looks pretty bad right I just turned off some lights and I changed the post-processing settings in the application that recorded this video so because of the image sensor that is so small it has a lot of issues catching light so if you don't have the ability to catch much light you have to do stuff in post-processing to make it look better so there's this Auto exposure setting and auto ISO settings to make the image look grainy but because it's grainy er it can actually show you more of the picture you can see the person in the picture but you can see it's a very shitty look let's talk about my light setup or yours maybe in the future so if you don't have many options just find the biggest light you have and put it behind your camera and blast your face is of the small image sensor that cannot really catch much light blasting your face is by far the best way to actually show your face well on a camera so I actually have a bit of a more fancy setup that I found out about by doing some research and it's not that hard to figure out and let's have a look at it so this is the three-point light setup so I'm using a key light which is a bit on the side of me which is the most strong light with the biggest intensity that lights my face then there's the fill light that lights the other side of my face so I don't have too many shadows and then there's a hair light they call this a backlight or a rim light sometimes that lights you from the side so to put you a bit more in the foreground to separate you from the background so let's have a look what it means to turn on some lights and how that change is the perception of the webcam so now I'm using Philips hue so I have a phone I'm just clicking some buttons so this is my default light setup as you can see I just darkened everything and there's a bit of colored light behind me you don't need these colors I just use them for fun so let's start with my key light let's find the button there it is what you see that blasts this is a very intense light that really lights up my face and casts a little bit of shadow behind my chin here just this stuff then let's open my fill light so the fill light actually lights the other side of my face and now it's a bit more even and now let's change the hair light so this is a light that I actually made blue because I just like to have a blue light it can be any color doesn't really matter but this separates me a little bit from the background and it also makes the shadows behind me a bit less harsh so this is my base setup of course it's not the final product yet but it's getting there and it's already like 10 times better than not having any we're almost there I promise we just have to change some settings and post-process the feature we say and that's basically how you get your your final image so let's open the settings and here we go my camera is a logitech it's a Brio which is the most expensive one they make but it's not even much better than the other one I had which was a bunch cheaper goes to show that webcams just don't get much better and less they really start to change the game but I don't think they will because there's just not enough market for it you want to spend more money just buy a real camera right so let's have a look at those settings so these are the properties that come with that with that logitech camera I suggest not to touch anything the only thing you should do is make sure you don't have the backlight compensation no game because we have good light we don't need all that stuff and also fix your white balance to the same number every time so don't auto white balance this it will do a whole bunch of stuff based on that's if your screen flickers lighter it will change your white balance and you don't always want that you want it to be fixed so you know what you're dealing with but then when you look at the camera control don't touch exposure exposure is truly well I don't know a Logitech whenever I touch this either my framerate goes to ten and everything is or my image looks like crap just just don't touch much of it right so keep it at Auto and also don't turn on low-light compensation because we have a bunch of light on us right there's no need for compensating in post-processing next to changing the settings we also have filters these are overlays over your video that post-process the signal to make it look better so as you can see now I'm using a color correction and a lot while they're both off so this is just the webcam and blasting lights at my face as you can see let's start with color correction I'm only changing a small amount and it really gives you a much better look so let's have a look how it looks when I turn on the color correction you see that's a pretty big difference actually it makes it a little bit more dark more contrasty more visual more popping whatever you want to call it it's a creative term right so just use this to your own opinion change it up a little bit have a look and don't change too much because it would look like crap I'm just change them slightly so then we have lots a lot is generally used in film it's to color grade your whole movie basically to give it like an extra cinematic look stuff like that but currently it's off but let me just turn it on and I'll show you what that looks like it's not a big change but it makes it a bit better right so now the look is it's more faded a little bit more cinematic let's say so when you have a look and I ask more it looks like crap so don't do that so I'm always it like 30% on each lot I'll show you what it looks like if I change some other thing so nuts are basically just images that the the software understands and applies but currently I'm using this one so let's just maybe use this one if I put it at a hundred percent it's actually kind of grayscales me or if I want something that pops much more you see now there's a lot of colors it's kind of shitty but it works right and there's a bunch of different packs of lets you can buy for free or and apply for free download for free so this is like a film default and it's always better around like in my opinion thirty percent is the best so let's put it back of where I was which is this one and this one I like the most you can safely stop here and be quite happy with the output of your webcam now it looks decent enough but I wanted more and I actually wanted something that's not really possible with webcams I wanted a shallow depth of field or a blurry background anything professional that you see that's filmed with a proper camera on either YouTube or on the television or anything it has this really nice blurry effect I wanted this but due to the form factor of the webcam and the small image sensor and all of that stuff we talked about it's just not possible but there's a I you know there are some programs that actually detect my face and my body and then cut me out of the background and then blur the background for me this is pretty fun I think Skype even try to do it but it's really shitty but I bought this app called xsplit xsplit ficam and shitty thing to say sorry it's pretty cool so let's have a look how that works here you go so actually there it is the xsplit speak em this is basically a proxy between my the image that my logitech gives me and the program that I recorded so right now I can actually configure the video when I click on figure I actually go to xsplit rather than to my logitech settings and as you can see I can actually remove the background right now this doesn't work super well because I'm lighting myself with blue light and it just doesn't really know what to do with that so if I made that white I could get this better but for the purpose of what I use it for it's actually kind of fine and I'm going to be original background again but you can actually blur it out so the blue light is still doing some weird stuff but if I just put it low enough like around 10% this blur actually looks pretty decent so have a look at this right now you cannot really see the guitar brands anymore and the books are a little bit blurry so I'm popping much more because my background is blurry so this is just this extra thing you have to pay for it and it's not real it's just AI trying to you know make real life and over time this will get better obviously but probably over time I'll be getting a better camera if I want to do more of this um thanks for watching I know it was a pretty long video with a lot of details but you know it's it's pretty cool that if you do some research you can get your camera to look good even when it's a shitty webcam you just need to know what you're doing because this is one of my first videos and I've never really done this before I just did some research and decided to do this please leave some comments or feedback or questions or whatever because I'm probably doing it pretty wrong if you consider there are people that use cameras every day anyways thanks very much for watching and I'll see you next time