What Is the Best Lighting for Video Calls at Home?

Put one soft light in front of your face at about eye level, and turn off or block whatever is glowing behind you. That single change fixes more calls than any webcam upgrade, because the best lighting for video calls at home is not a brighter room, it is a room where the brightest thing in frame is your face.

The silhouette is not the camera being stupid, it is the camera doing exactly what it was built to do. An overcast sky outside your window reads around 1,000 lux while a lit room sits at 320-500 lux, so the sensor stops down for the glass and takes your face with it. A second light on the wall behind you is what stops the shot looking flat once the front light is sorted, and that is the job a wall fixture does well: the Houseland macaron sconce hardwires to a standard wall box with no visible cord, so it adds a light without adding a cable across the desk.

Why does my face go dark when there is a window behind me?

Your camera is metering the whole frame and the window wins. Wikipedia's metering mode article describes the patterns a webcam borrows: average metering "uses light information from the entire scene and creates an average for the final exposure setting", while center-weighted metering "concentrates on the central 60-80% of the scene". Spot metering reads only 1-5% of the frame and would save you, but a webcam does not offer it.

The numbers say why no automatic exposure can split the difference: full daylight outside runs 10,000-25,000 lux and an overcast sky about 1,000 lux, against 320-500 lux for office lighting indoors. Those figures are from the illuminance table in Wikipedia's lux entry. A window behind your head is routinely 20 to 50 times brighter than the room the camera is trying to expose, and the camera protects the highlight.

Two fixes cost nothing. Turn the desk so the window is in front of you, or drop the blind for the length of the call. Custom Virtual Office says the same thing in its guide to looking washed out on Zoom: "Sitting with a window behind you is one of the most common mistakes." A better webcam changes none of this.

What is the best lighting for video calls at home, in the order worth doing?

Work through it cheapest first, because steps four and five only pay off once one to three are done.

1. Take the backlight out. Blind down, or swing the chair so the window falls across one cheek rather than behind your head.
2. Move the brightest lamp you already own to the front, roughly level with your eyes and slightly to one side of the screen.
3. Switch the ceiling light off, or turn it down. A downlight on its own drops shadow straight into the eye sockets, under the brow and under the chin, which is the tired look people blame on the camera.
4. Add a second, dimmer light on the wall behind you so your hair and shoulders stop merging into it.
5. Buy a panel or ring light last, once you know what the first four steps left you with.

Do not confuse this with the desk-lighting figure people quote at each other. Calder Electrical Services' summary of EN 12464-1 puts an office workstation at 300-500 lux with glare at UGR 19 or lower and color rendering of CRI 80 or better. That is about reading a keyboard, not about the vertical light landing on your face, which is the only light the call sees.

How do I place a light so I do not get raccoon eyes?

Get the source in front of you, a little above your eyes, and a little off to one side, then soften it. Wikipedia's Rembrandt lighting entry puts the key "high and to one side at the front" with the fill "at half-height and on the other side at the front, set to about half the power of the key light". That ratio is the whole trick: two-to-one, not two matched lamps firing at your nose.

1. Sit where you normally sit, start the call preview, and move the lamp before you move anything else.
2. Raise the key until the shadow under your nose points down rather than sideways, then stop. Higher than that and the eye sockets go dark again.
3. Put the fill on the opposite side at roughly half the brightness. A white wall, a sheet of paper or a door panel bouncing the key works as well as a second bulb.
4. Look at the wall behind you last. If your shoulders disappear into it, that wall needs its own light, not more light on you.

Softness is geometry, not price: the same 12W bulb bounced off a wall two feet away is a far kinder light than the bare bulb pointed at you. Wikipedia's soft light article puts it as three variables, "the size of its surface, its distance from the object, and the thickness of its diffusion material", and notes you can soften a source "by bouncing the light off a surface". A bare LED aimed at your face is a small, hard source, and it draws every line you own.

Ring light vs a wall sconce beside the desk: which does what?

The ring light is your key and a sconce is your second light, and swapping those two jobs is where most home setups go wrong.

An aimable fixture is what makes the background job possible from a wall. The Houseland macaron sconce swivels about 90 degrees, so the head can be turned into the wall for a bounce instead of pointed at the back of your head, and its cylinder design stands 9.4 in (24 cm) off the wall, which is far enough to clear the corner of a monitor. What that bounce is worth depends on your paint: a pale warm wall returns a usable neutral, a saturated one returns its own color, which is the same argument behind which colors look best against warm greige walls. If you want glow rather than light back there, the trade-offs in a backlit wall panel against an LED strip apply to a home office wall as much as a bedroom one.

From the shop

Macaron Bedside Wall Sconce, Adjustable Wood Base Wall Lamp, 3 Shapes 13 Colors

The macaron sconce swivels about 90 degrees to aim the beam and hardwires to a standard wall box with no visible cord. The E27 socket takes standard US E26 LED bulbs, with an optional 12W warm or 12W white bulb.

View the macaron bedside sconce — 13 colourways & current price

What color temperature and bulb should I put in it?

Pick one temperature and run every light in the shot at it. Wikipedia's color temperature table puts a soft white LED at 2,700 K, a cool white or daylight LED at 5,000 K, and vertical daylight at 5,500-6,000 K. Mix a 2,700 K lamp with window light and the camera's white balance has to choose: it corrects for one, and the other turns orange or blue behind you.

If daylight is in the room, match it. Custom Virtual Office recommends matching daylight at 5,000-6,500 K and warns that warm 2,700-3,000 K bulbs skew yellow on camera. In a room with the blinds shut and no daylight at all, a warm bulb is fine as long as it is the only temperature in the frame.

The spec that actually decides whether your skin reads healthy is R9, the saturated red index buried inside CRI. Wikipedia's color rendering index article is blunt about it: "if the R9 value is not good enough, the skin tone under this light will be more paleness or even greenish in your eyes or cameras", and it warns that CRI alone "is not a good indicator for use in visual assessment of light sources, especially for sources below 5000 kelvin". Cheap high-CRI claims often hide a poor R9, so look for the number itself on the box.

Bulb choice is the reason a hardwired fixture is not a lock-in. The Houseland sconce takes an E27 socket that standard US E26 LED bulbs fit, and it ships with an optional 12W warm bulb, a 12W white bulb, or no bulb at all, so the temperature in your shot stays your choice.

Can the app fix this without me buying a light?

Partly, and it is worth trying before you spend anything. Zoom's video settings documentation lists four switches that change how you look. "Adjust for low light" is described as a feature that "improves video brightness and quality in low-light surroundings. When enabled, choose between Auto and Manual low-light settings". "Portrait lighting" is described as one that "dims your background while brightening you in the foreground". "Touch up my appearance" applies "a softening effect to your appearance".

• Turn HD video on first. Nothing else you change matters at a lower resolution.
• Try "Adjust for low light" on Manual and stop at the first setting that looks acceptable.
• Leave "Portrait lighting" off if you already lit the background, because it darkens the thing you just paid to light.

Software brightening amplifies the signal the sensor captured, so it cannot invent detail that never landed on the chip. Wikipedia's image noise entry notes that raising gain amplifies a weak signal and that visible grain comes with reduced dynamic range, which on a webcam shows up as mush across the cheeks and a background that turns to static. Photons first, gain second.

What I'd do

Blind down, laptop raised on books until the lens is level with my eyes, one soft light in front and slightly to the left, one light on the wall behind me at roughly half that brightness.

The only thing I would actually buy is the second light, because a front light can be any lamp on the desk and a background light cannot. On a rented wall a plug-in lamp is the safer answer; on a wall you can drill, a fixture that hardwires out of the shot is tidier. The Houseland macaron wall sconce is the shape I would use for it, with the head swivelled into the wall rather than at the camera, and the rest of the wall lamps range does the same job in other shapes.

Then dress the wall so it has something to catch the light. A shelf with two or three objects at different heights reads better on a webcam than a blank plane, and the spacing rules in what shelves look good on a narrow wall with white paint hold up on camera too.

Shop wall lamps from Houseland

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