Zoom Lighting

Setting it up

1. 1

   Put the screen in front of you, slightly above eye level and a little to one side. A second monitor, a tablet or a laptop all work.

2. 2

   Go full screen so the whole panel is lighting you rather than a window full of browser.

3. 3

   Choose the warmth that matches the other light in the room. Mixing a warm lamp with a cold screen gives you two skin tones at once.

4. 4

   Set the level so your camera preview looks natural rather than blown out, then raise your display's own brightness if you need more light.

What this actually does

It fills the screen with light-colored pixels. That is the whole trick, and it is a genuinely useful one at close range, because a large, even surface is a soft light source: it wraps around a face instead of throwing the hard shadows a small lamp produces.

What it does not do is make your display brighter than it can be. The level control here dims the picture toward black; the amount of light leaving the panel is set by the display's own brightness control, which is usually in a hardware menu or your system settings. If you want more light, that is the dial to turn.

Getting a good result

Position beats everything. A light in front of you at roughly eye level flatters; the same light below you does the opposite, and a bright window behind you makes any camera darken your face to cope. If one side of your face is much darker than the other, a second screen on the dark side at a lower level evens it out — that is what the Fill Light is for, and the Ring Light does the same job in a shape that lets a camera sit in the middle.

Check the result rather than guessing at it: your call software's own preview, or the Webcam Test, shows what the camera is actually sending.