While most people are on the same page with tip #1, lighting is where things start to fall apart. 2 - Light yourself separately from the background If you post up in front of a background with a million different colors and patterns, that will make life harder for Zoom to create a solid virtual background and that’s when you start to look like Caspar the friendly ghost.

Now if you don’t have a green screen, you can also get away with using a solid wall as your background before you flip the virtual background switch in Zoom. As a result, it’s easier for Zoom to know that wherever that color shows up in the frame, it will be replaced by the image you want to use as your background. The reason why “green screens” are that color is because that shade of green is rarely seen anywhere else in life.

1 - Make sure that your background is a solid color that you’re not wearing. If you still want to move ahead and use virtual backgrounds, here are a couple tips to keep in mind when staging and lighting for this look. And when they’re done looking like ghosts, their body movement often reveals what’s going on in the backgrounds of the space in which they’re broadcasting.įolks - please stop allowing for crappy production quality, will ya? The speakers look like apparitions disappearing and reappearing the moment they move around and talk. If you don’t properly light and stage for a virtual setup, it’s going to, in most cases, look like total and complete dog shit.Īnd anyone who has ever attended a virtual event knows exactly what I’m talking about. Quite frankly, I can count on one hand the amount of times I’ve shot speakers on virtual backgrounds where the look was seamless. While leveraging a virtual background is as simple as hitting a button, making it look good isn’t quite so automatic. Like many of these conferences that I’ve photographed over the past year, they opted to use a consistent, virtual background for each of the presenters.Īnd, much to my dismay, every single one of the presenters looked mehhh when they enabled this background. I was shooting a virtual conference earlier this week that involved a slew of virtual speakers from all over the country.

Zoom backgrounds without green screen