Solution: Adjust the monitor brightness and/or contrast down to the threshold at which you can just barely see comfortably (just while you are using your webcam.) Just adding light (other then that from the monitor) has partially solved the computer glare problem. Have you been noticing how the room lights appear to rise and fall based on the intensity of our front light? Kill the Computer's Reflection in Your Eyes I usually prefer diffused for extra control and the fact that it retains more light intensity.ģ. Your call on whether to diffuse the light or bounce it. I killed the background lights because the dimmer front source made them appear too bright in the back. This makes for a bigger, softer and dimmer light source. Variation: Turn the bare lamp around and bounce it off of the wall, if there is one. Some differences: The shiny highlight in my forehead thankfully lessens in intensity, which is due to the larger apparent size of the light source.Īlso, the typing paper knocks down the brightness of the lamp, which means that the auto exposure adjustment causes (a) the background and (b) the computer reflection to come up some. I just taped the paper to the open front of the lamp and the harsh light is now softened. Just two cents worth of office supplies gets you a softer light source. Solution: Diffuse the light with typing paper. And you'll notice that the bright front light causes the webcam to lower the overall exposure, dropping the background down a tad.īut the bright, harsh light of the engineer's lamp is not doing me any favors. As you'll see in a minute, your webcam will auto-magically adjust for it when you help out a little. But for these purposes it doesn't really matter what kind of bulb you have. Mine happens to be one of those adjustable engineering lamps, with a CFL bulb. Solution: Turn on your flippin' desk lamp. Can you guess what color my desktop is? Did you guess blue?Ĭompounding that is the fact that the background light is brighter than the foreground light.

This is worst possible case, IMO, and exactly how the majority of webcam'ers operate.Īs seen here, we have the computer monitor acting as our light source. For Pete's Sake, Don't Use Your Monitor as a Light Source

That said, here are five common webcam problems and their easy fixes.ġ. And the webcam is an easy way to play around with lighting and see instant results. We're talking basic, low-end-theory off-camera lighting, folks. Which is such a shame, really, when you consider how easy this is to fix. We're taking a little detour today to talk lighting in a context other than still photos.Įach day, untold bandwidth is being used to transmit really bad webcam image quality.

Image mixer 3 not reading camera