As with everyone in the world at the moment, I’m joining a lot more Video calls than I was last year. This week Jeff Teper announced that Microsoft Teams hit 115 million daily active users. With this steep rise, one thing I see all the time is dimly lit faces with fluctuating brightness depending on which window they have open on their screen. I was also suffering from this myself, so I decided to sort it out and thought I’d share how to be seen on video chat.
Below is a photo of me in a Teams meeting before I made any changes. This doesn’t actually look too bad compared to some, but bear in mind this was taken at about 2pm when my office is at it’s brightest. You can see by the shadows on the wall too that I had the light on too!
The first and most effective fix I applied was simply adjusting the brightness of the Camera in Windows 10. I didn’t even realise this was possible when using the built-in webcam. To do this, open the camera app in Windows 10 (you’ll need to turn off video in all other apps first). When in Photo mode, click settings and enable “Pro Mode”.
Once you’ve enabled “Pro Mode”, you’ll now see you can adjust the brightness of the image, as you can see in the image below.
Set the brightness to your preferred level. I set my brightness to be about +33 which seemed about right for me.
You’ll now see that when you return to your Teams Video, the brightness has been improved there too!
In less that 30 seconds my video quality has improved dramatically and I can now be seen when on video calls. Sorry guys!
If you want to take it a step further, as I did – you could buy yourself a webcam light. I didn’t want to break the bank, so I opted for this Monitor Light Bar for about £25 but I am extremely pleased with it and the added improvement it brings.
With the light bar on, I found the lighting to appear that little bit more natural. It also took the strain off of the artificial brightness which I think improved the overall picture quality and looked less grainy.
Overall, it seems that it’s pretty easy to be seen on video chat. You can do it by simply adjusting the brightness in the Camera app for zero cost, or go one step further and add a little added lighting to make a real improvement.
