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How to light a video call with your screen

· 10 min read · The WhiteScreen.tv team

Warm sunlight falling through window blinds onto a wall beside a plant
Window Light, from our screensaver collection. A large, soft source flatters a face, and a screen is a small version of one.

A bright white screen is one of the cheapest key lights you can get. It is large, it is soft, and it is probably already on your desk. It also has limits, and most disappointing results come from a handful of fixable mistakes: the light is behind you, too far away, the wrong color for the room, or bouncing straight off your glasses.

This guide takes them one at a time.

First, deal with the light behind you

Microsoft's Teams guidance says to "make sure your face is lit from the front and avoid strong backlighting, shadows, or glare" (Microsoft Support). Google's Meet tips agree: keep light on your face and not behind you, "to avoid creating a silhouette" (Google Workspace).

A bright window behind your head makes the camera expose for the window and leaves your face in shadow, and no screen will win that fight. Turn the desk so the window is beside or in front of you, or close the blind. Then add the screen.

Where to put the screen

One laptop. If the webcam sits above the display, the display is already a light source just below the lens. The catch is that you also need that screen for the call. A full-screen white page hides the meeting, so on a single device the most you can do is turn the display to full brightness and keep bright, light-colored windows around the meeting window. It helps a little; a second device helps a lot more.

A second device as a key light. A tablet, a spare phone, an old laptop or a second monitor showing the white screen in full screen makes a far better light, because you can place it where light flatters a face. The classic film setup puts the main light "at a 45-degree angle off the axis formed by your subject and camera" and raises it high (Campus Technology). In practice, stand the device to one side of your camera, roughly 30 to 45 degrees off to the side, with its center at or a little above your eyes. One side of your face ends up brighter than the other, which gives it shape.

Height matters. A device lying on the desk lights you from below, which is the horror-film angle. Prop it up on books or a stand until it is level with your eyes or slightly higher.

Distance does most of the work

Light spreads out as it travels. For a small source, the inverse-square law applies: double the distance and you get a quarter of the light (HyperPhysics). A screen is not a small source at desk distances, though. Photometry handbooks say the inverse-square law only holds well once the distance is "greater than five times the largest dimension of the source" (Ryer, Light Measurement Handbook). A 14-inch laptop screen is about 36 cm corner to corner, so that point is almost two meters away. Closer than that, the light falls off a little more gently.

Here is what that looks like for a 14-inch laptop screen (about 31 x 17.5 cm) showing white at 400 nits, measured straight in front of it. We worked these out with the standard formula for light from an evenly glowing rectangle, the same method we use in our light therapy article:

Distance from screenLight reaching your face
20 cmabout 360 lux
40 cmabout 120 lux
60 cmabout 57 lux
80 cmabout 33 lux
1 mabout 21 lux

Moving the screen from 80 cm to 40 cm gives you nearly four times as much light. Moving it from 40 cm to 20 cm gives you about three times as much. Real screens send less light out at an angle than this simple model assumes, so treat the numbers as an upper estimate. For comparison, Canada's workplace safety agency puts adequate general lighting at 500 to 1,000 lux on the desk (CCOHS).

So bring the light device as close as you can without it showing in the frame, usually 30 to 50 cm from your face. A screen also works best in a dim room: the camera cares about how bright your face is compared with what is behind you, so switching off a bright light behind you can do as much as adding one in front.

Brightness

Turn the light device's own brightness all the way up, and switch off auto-brightness and battery saver while you use it. A web page cannot make a display brighter than its maximum, and our bright white screen page explains the settings that quietly dim it. Panels differ a lot: Apple lists the current MacBook Air at "500 nits brightness" (Apple), and many budget laptops and monitors are dimmer.

On a computer, you can scroll the mouse wheel in full screen on our pages to lower the brightness in 5% steps. It only goes down from the panel's maximum, which is useful when the light is too harsh up close or glares on glasses.

The camera can help too. Zoom has a setting called "Adjust for low light" in its video settings (Zoom Support), and recent Macs offer a Studio light effect that "dims the background and illuminates your face" (Apple Support). Both work best when there is already some real light on you.

Color temperature: match the room

Light color is measured on the Kelvin scale. "Lower K means warmer, yellowish light, while higher K means cooler, bluer light" (ENERGY STAR). Household bulbs sold as soft or warm white sit at the warm end, around 2,700 to 3,000 K. A standard screen's white is the D65 white point, which corresponds to about 6,500 K (W3C CSS Color 4). So a plain white screen is a cool light compared with most living-room lamps.

That matters because the camera can only pick one white balance. As one interviewee in Adobe's guide to white balance puts it, "anytime you mix lighting sources, it's going to make it hard to find your white balance" (Adobe). With a cool screen on your face and warm bulbs behind you, you end up with a bluish face against an orange room, or a normal face against a strangely orange background.

You have three ways out:

  1. Make the room match the screen. Daylight from a window in front of you is also cool, so it mixes well with a white screen. Turning off warm lamps behind you also works.
  2. Make the screen a little warmer. The Zoom Lighting preset on our color screen pages uses a slightly warm white (#fff5e6). By our calculation that is roughly 5,700 K on a standard display, so it is a nudge, not a full match for warm bulbs.
  3. Warm the whole device. Because the light device is only a light, you can turn on its night mode. Night Shift on a Mac lets you set how warm the display gets (Apple Support), and Windows, iOS and Android have similar settings. Night mode costs some brightness, so use the strongest setting you need and no more.

Glare on glasses

Glasses reflect light like a mirror, and "the angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection" (HyperPhysics). A bright screen directly in front of you, next to the camera, reflects straight back into the lens as two white rectangles.

The fix is geometry. Film crews "raise your light high, angle it down, and position it off to the side of your subject" (No Film School). Another crew's trick is to raise the arms of the frame slightly behind the ears, which tilts the lenses down so the reflection misses the lens (Wistia). In practice:

  • Move the light device higher and further to the side until the reflection leaves your lenses in the self-view.
  • Turn down the brightness of the screen right in front of you, since it is the one most likely to reflect into the camera, and let the side device do the lighting.

Two-device setups

Key and fill. Put one device at 45 degrees as the main light and let your main screen act as a softer fill from the front. Film lighting keeps the fill "a little dimmer than your key light" (Campus Technology), so turn the front screen down a little.

Both sides. Two devices at equal brightness, one on each side, give an even light with fewer shadows. Moving the light off the camera axis also tends to keep reflections out of glasses.

Set every device to the same color, all white or all Zoom Lighting, so your face does not end up with two different tints. On our pages, tick Keep screen awake so the light does not switch off mid-call.

When a real light is better

A screen is a convenient light, not a powerful one. Small lights built for video calls are designed to send their output toward your face. Logitech rates its Litra Glow at "250 Lumen max output" with a color temperature you can set from 2,700 to 6,500 K (Logitech), and Elgato rates its current Key Light Air at "up to 2,100 lumens" (Elgato). Lumens and the nits on a screen spec sheet measure different things, so they cannot be compared directly, but in practice a dedicated light is easier to make bright, easier to aim, and easier to warm up to match a room.

Consider a proper light if:

  • you cannot avoid a bright window or room behind you;
  • you need all your screens for the meeting itself;
  • you wear glasses and need the light high and to the side, which is easier with a lamp on a stand.

Before you buy anything, remember Microsoft's point that "even a simple desk lamp in the right spot can make a big difference" (Microsoft Support). A lamp bounced off a white wall in front of you is a very soft light.

A two-minute checklist

  1. No bright window behind you.
  2. A second device showing the white screen at 30 to 45 degrees off the camera, at or above eye level, 30 to 50 cm away, at full brightness with Keep screen awake ticked.
  3. White for daylight rooms, Zoom Lighting or night mode for warm bulbs.
  4. Glasses: light higher and further to the side.
  5. Check the self-view before you join.

If you also use a screen as a light in the evening, our guide to using a screen as a night or reading light explains why the advice changes after dark.

Sources

More from WhiteScreen.tv: the screensaver collection and the changelog. How we source and check articles: editorial standards.