How to Light Yourself on Camera

Lighting is where the largest improvement in your video quality is available, and it costs less than a camera upgrade.

Soft, not bright

A large source close to you produces soft light: shadows with gradual edges, skin that looks like skin. A small source produces hard light: sharp shadow edges, every texture emphasised.

Brightness has nothing to do with it. A small very bright light is hard light. The specification that matters is the size of the emitting surface relative to how far away it is. The Elgato Key Light (at Amazon, opens in a new tab) is built around exactly that principle: a large panel kept close to the desk (see our full review). A budget panel like the Neewer 660 LED panel (at Amazon, opens in a new tab) gets you similar size for less, provided you diffuse it yourself.

Where to put it

In front of you, off to one side by roughly forty-five degrees, above eye level and angled down.

That produces a gentle gradient across your face, which reads as depth. Straight on and level is the flat look, and behind you is a silhouette. Our lighting roundup compares more options across budgets.

One colour, not several

Mixed sources are the other common problem. A warm desk lamp and cool daylight from a window give you two differently coloured halves of a face, and no camera white balance corrects both.

Pick a temperature, match everything in shot to it, and set white balance manually so the camera stops drifting between them.

How we assessed these

The principles here are optics rather than product claims. Where products are named, the judgement rests on published panel size, output, diffusion and colour control, and nothing was measured or photographed under by us.