Zoom Lighting
Fills a screen with an even, adjustable white so you can use it as a fill light on a call. A monitor or tablet held near your face is a large, soft light source, which is the kind that flatters a webcam - and unlike the ceiling light behind you, it is in front of you where it does some good.
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Lays black over the color. A browser cannot reach your hardware brightness, so this only ever makes the screen darker - turn the display itself up if you need more light.
Setting it up
- Put the lit screen behind your camera and slightly above your eye line, so the light comes from where the camera is looking. A second monitor turned toward you, a tablet propped on a stack of books, or a phone on a stand all work.
- Move it close. Light falls off fast, and the difference between an arm's length and two is dramatic. Close also means softer, because a big source near your face wraps around it instead of carving shadows into it.
- Turn the screen's own brightness up first, in your operating system or on the monitor. That is the only control that changes how much light actually leaves the panel - the dimmer here can only take it back down again.
- Then set the color temperature to match the room. If you have a warm lamp on, go warm; if you are sitting in daylight, go cool. A face lit by two different colors from two directions is the thing that looks wrong on a call, even when nobody can say why.
- Finally, look at your camera preview rather than at the screen. Adjust until the shadow under your chin softens and your face is a little brighter than the wall behind you - and stop there, because a face brighter than everything else in frame reads as a spotlight.
What a screen can and cannot do as a light
A screen puts out the light it puts out, and that is set by your hardware brightness - nothing on a web page can raise it. What this page controls is color and how much of that light you throw away with the dimmer, which means the honest ceiling is a bright white screen at your current setting. That is genuinely useful within about a meter in a room that is already dimly lit. It will not overpower a window behind you, it will not replace a proper light for anything you are filming seriously, and it costs you the screen for the duration. The upside is that you already own it, it is soft, and it takes ten seconds to set up.
Reading the numbers
Color temperature is measured in kelvin, and the scale runs the opposite way to intuition: 2700K is the warm orange of a household bulb, 4000K is the neutral white of an office fitting, and 6500K is the cool blue-white of overcast daylight, which is also roughly what most displays call white. The slider walks that line and the maths behind it is the standard blackbody approximation, so the colors land where the labels say they do. Soft pink steps off the line deliberately - a touch of magenta instead of the yellow-green that low color temperatures carry, which suits some skin tones better than plain warm white.
Frequently asked questions
Can this make my screen brighter than maximum?
No. There is no browser API for hardware brightness and there is not going to be one, for good reasons - a web page that could turn your screen up would be a page that could blind you in a dark room. Everything here happens inside the picture: the brightest thing this page can show is white at whatever brightness your display is already set to. Turn that up yourself first, then use this to set the color.
Does it work with Zoom, Teams, Meet or anything else?
It works with all of them, because it does not touch your call at all. It is a lit screen pointed at your face - your camera sees the light, and the software on the other side sees whatever your camera produces. Nothing needs configuring and nothing needs installing.
Is this as good as a ring light?
No, and it is worth being clear about that. A proper light is brighter, so it works in a bright room and further away, and it does not tie up a screen. What this does have is size - a monitor is a much larger source than a small ring, which makes for softer shadows - and immediacy. If you are on a call in ten minutes and the light in the room is bad, this fixes most of it. If you are on camera every day, buy a light.
Which color temperature should I pick?
Whichever matches the light already falling on you. Evening, a lamp on, curtains closed: go warm, around 2700K to 3000K. Daytime with a window open: go cool, 5000K and up. Overhead office lighting usually sits somewhere in the middle. If you are not sure, put your camera preview on screen, sweep the slider slowly and stop where your skin stops looking orange or gray.
Will a white screen for an hour hurt my display?
On an LCD, no - it is doing exactly what it does all day. On an OLED, a bright static image over long periods is what causes uneven ageing, so an occasional call is fine but leaving a white field up for hours every day is not a habit to build on an OLED panel. If you have a spare LCD, that is the screen to point at yourself.