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The thing about Webcams is they have automatic settings that are made to accommodate as many different lighting setups as possible.
That means they average out a whole lot of responses to what’s in the frame and because of that, generally suck. I mean you can ‘see’ someone and that’s certainly a start but there’s a big difference between communicating with someone who appears clear correctly lit and communicating with someone who appears to be reporting from a war zone.
The first thing that can do 80% of the job for you is a simple desk lamp or if you’re feeling fancy, a dedicated video light. The main reason you need a light behind your webcam is to fill in the ugly shadows caused by overhead lighting.
It would be nice if it matched the colour temperature of the overhead lights – so cool white with cool white or tungsten yellow with tungsten yellow but my desk lamp doesn’t because I just can’t get the right bulb at the moment and it still looks better than not having that light at all.
The next thing to do is get iGlasses from ecomm for Mac or MyCam from E2Esoft (because why have a simple to pronounce business name?) for PC which is about 10 quid and appears to do the same thing but I can’t test it – We live in a mac world so if you’ve got a mac, we can definitely say buy iGlasses – it’s worth it.
Once you’ve got it installed, iGlasses will appear as an option within the video settings of Zoom.
So for instance with Zoom the automatic settings of the built-in webcam makes you look like a mutant tomato because the automatic settings can’t work out the colour temperature between a tungsten lamp and a cool overhead light but when you go into video options in Zoom with it installed, you can see iGlasses and when you select it, I suddenly, you look human again.
First impressions are everything and if your brands spent years building up an image thats professional and high quality, you can ruin it in a split second with a cluttered and messy background.
Tidy up at the very least, remove clutter, think about what you have in the background and spend time on making sure you continue to exude the quality your brand usually does. It’s such a basic thing to fix but most people, when they Zoom ignore it and probably harm their image.
Remember – Zoom isn’t just for video calls.
It’s also able to record those calls which – with permission! – can be cut into soundbites
as part of your comms strategy. Also you can use it to just record yourself in HD.
So rather than navigate a bunch of different platforms, Zoom covers it all all.
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