5 Lighting Tips to Improve your Videos

Few do-it-yourself video creators realize the importance of good lighting in their videos, yet lighting is one of the most critical phases of the video process. You can create cinematic videos using just your smartphone without having to invest in expensive equipment if you know these five lighting principles.

1. Light Your Subject

The most fundamental tip when creating a video is to make sure your subject and the scene are adequately lit when filming. By drawing the viewer's attention, setting the tone of the shot, and ensuring the audience has enough visibility, lighting your subject well is crucial. However, how do you light your subject well? You can either use natural light or creating a setup that delivers enough light on your subject. Always do test shots. Test images after your setting are determined to see how they look on camera. Is the subject too bright? What shadows do you want? What shadows do you need to eliminate? Test shots allow you to adapt and eliminate what you don’t want, and accentuate what you do want.

2. Use a 3-Light Technique

To create a 3-point lighting setup, you'll obviously need three lights—a key light, a fill light, and a backlight. Let's go over each of these lights and see what they contribute to understand 3-point lighting better.

First, let's look at the key light. The key light is the important light in your production. It is positioned in front of your subject at a 45 degree angle to produce wonderful shadows. It can be any type of light from a candle or flashlight to a production quality LED or stage light. The key light sets the mood or tone of the scene.

A fill light can be used to correct the shadows produced by the key light. To make your subject pop, you can either use a less intense light source or reflectors such as walls and fabrics to bounce light onto them. Cinematographers use fill light to accent the mood or tone created by the key light. A cinematographer once described it to me as, “a delicate game.”

The back light is used to make your subject stand out from the background. It adds depth to the image. Back light is also helpful when shooting with a cell phone camera that lacks the aperture range necessary for creating depth. It is also a way to create mood, as seen in this video here.

Using these three together can help create a great image that you or your client will be proud of.

3. Avoid Overhead Lighting

If you hang out with a cinematographer for a day, you’ll quickly discover that they will turn off overhead lights fairly often. That’s because most ceiling lights give the subjects’ faces a uniform tone that can easily create unwanted shadows. As a result, their features are often obscured and unflattering. Instead of using overhead lighting, many cinematographers switch to adjustable lamps, LED lights, or ring lights that can be positioned in front of your subject. You can even use these to supplement the overhead light by projecting light from the other direction in order to reduce shadows.

4. Be Aware of Exposure

Exposure is the amount of light entering the camera, essentially the light and darkness of the image. Using these variations of light can help create that mood one looks for in an image. When using shadows in a video to make it look really cinematic, you don't want your frame to be underexposed. If you want to do this, position the camera and the light source on opposite sides of your subject at 45° angles, creating a setup where the subject, the camera, and the light source all stand on the three corners of a triangle. In order to create this setup, you want to put the camera on the three-side of the triangle, the light source on the one-side, and the subject on the middle point. Doing so will help create a balanced look.

5. Understanding Soft Lighting v. Hard Lighting

Believe it or not, but light intensity is very important to the quality of your production. While harsh lighting can produce dramatic effects in movies, if you are recording professional videos or are just beginning, it is a lot simpler to use soft and diffused light. It all comes down to that word ‘mood’ again. The light intensity should reflect the mood you are going for in your production. Here’s a brief description of how these two work. Check this link for a deeper understanding.

Soft lighting is evenly distributed light that gives your subject a more even and less moody appearance. It can be accomplished indoors by using diffusers or soft boxes over your studio lighting. Use soft lighting for corporate productions and YouTube videos.

Hard lighting, on the other hand, produces sharp contrasts between bright highlights and very dark shadows. Hard lighting is frequently utilised in cinema, but it isn't recommended for professional videos as editing is difficult if the results are not well-controlled.

So, whether you are the avid YouTuber or a aspiring cinematographer, using these 5 tips can help you create more professional looking videos.