Guidelines for Optimal YouTube Video Brightness

How To Light Your YouTube Video

Richard Bennett

Oct 26, 2023• Proven solutions

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When it comes to sensitivity to light, no consumer-level camera sensor comes close in performance to the human eye. Many newbies to videography, though, don’t think about this when they use their camera indoors and discover that their recorded footage appears too dark.

If you want to use your camera indoors as many YouTubers do, you’ll need to have extra light. But the solution is not as simple as surrounding yourself with lamps that are all randomly placed.

Below, I’ll go into detail on how you can set up your lighting equipment to make your YouTube videos look good.

Part 1: Using Light You Already Have

Most beginner YouTubers light their videos with what they already have. That’s what I did to start as well. In the past, my video recording space consisted of natural sunlight coming from my window and ceiling light for times when the sunlight wasn’t strong enough.

1. Window Lighting

The best thing about window lighting is that it’s free. The worst thing about it is that it’s uncontrollable. The amount of light you get in your video can vary with all the changes in the weather.

Window lighting for me was especially difficult to work with because I live in a very rainy and cloudy city, Vancouver, Canada, where we pretty much just get three months of good sun.

Above are two freeze frames from one of Daniel’s past window-lit vlogs. Although these two frames are both from the same vlog, you can see that the image on the right looks brighter due to clearer skies at that moment. These varying amounts of light is what you will have to deal with if you choose to light your YouTube video with window lighting.

2. Home Lighting

Home lighting is another source of light that many new YouTubers use. In the past, when my window light wasn’t strong enough to light my video recording space, I would turn on the ceiling light.

Notice how the color of Daniel’s skin looks much more orange here (above) than the color of the skin in the two side-by-side window lighting examples? The side of the face also appears to look bluer. This all happened because he mixed up different color temperatures shining out of the two lights (cooler window light and warmer ceiling light).

Most home lighting is warmer in its color temperature. If you want to use your home lights without everything being orange-tinted, you’ll need to switch out your light bulbs for daytime LED light bulbs.

Ceiling lights are also typically situated in the center of a room in order to light an entire room evenly. This is not likely to be the best location for your filming video. Since the ceiling light was directly above the face in the above example, you can see harder shadows beneath his cheeks.

Part 2: Home Studio Lighting

If you rather not deal with all the window and home lighting challenges, you can set up studio lighting in your home.

1. Light Control

The first thing you’ll want to do to set up studio lighting in your home is to pick a room to film in and eliminate as much external lighting as you can. Use blinds, curtains, towels, or any thick fabric to block sunlight from shining into your room.

2. 3-Point Lighting

The most common setup for studio lighting is 3-point lighting. For this kind of lighting you’ll need three lights: a key light, a fill light, and a back light (also called a hair light).

Out of the three lights, the key light should be the brightest. When it is positioned to the left of you (as shown in the diagram above) your right side will have shadows.

To minimize the shadows on your right side, use a weaker light as a fill light. You don’t want your fill light to completely eliminate all your shadows or else your shot will look flat.

Lastly, a backlight positioned behind you can give an appealing highlight to the ends of your head and even help to separate your hair from blending into your background if both happen to be dark.

3. 4-Point Lighting

As a YouTuber, you may not only want yourself to be seen optimally with proper lighting, but you may also want your background to be seen optimally, especially if you’ve taken the time to decorate it for your audience.

What you’ll need to ensure that your background is sufficiently lit is 4-point lighting setup. The 4-point lighting setup is the same as a 3-point lighting setup, but with an additional light shining at your background.

For more information on lighting equipment, check out my Top 17 Video Lighting Equipment For YouTubers .

Touch Up YouTube Videos with Filmora

Filmora is one of the best video editing software for YouTube beginners to start the YouTube channel. So, if you find the lighting isn’t perfect after recording, you can use the Auto Color Enhancement feature in Filmora to adjust the color with one-click. Or, you can change the white balance, Light, color, and HSL manually. Filmora also features some presets and LUTs templates , which allows you to apply pre-programmed effects to video for color correction faster.

Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett is a writer and a lover of all things video.

Follow @Richard Bennett

Achieving Virality: YouTube Promotion No Cost Involved

How to Promote YouTube Videos (Without Paying)

Ollie Mattison

Mar 27, 2024• Proven solutions

Getting a unique idea for your YouTube video is great and implementing it is even greater. But what about promoting after creating the video? This is the biggest concern for many YouTubers especially those who are freshly entering the YouTube world. To work on marketing strategy is way too important than uploading video which many people don’t think of.

Since YouTube stands as one of the well-known video-sharing website and nearly 300 hours (estimated) of videos are uploaded every single minute, how would you make your video a storm of hype thereby reaching the essential target audience? Among the chain of YouTube channels, popularizing yours to let people know you; you need some smart tips to be a pro on this matter. And this is what today’s article stressed upon. Have a look and learn how to promote YouTube videos without paying to drive incredible traffic.

You may also like: YouTube to WAV File: 4 Best Free Convert Solutions >>

Part 1: How to Promote YouTube Videos Free

1. Come up compelling titles

To promote YouTube video the right way, focus firstly on the title of your video . As this is what viewers will notice first and your notable title will only encourage users to play the video further, try to keep it simple and on-point. Avoid providing long titles as Google automatically shortens it up to 66 characters on search results. Moreover, a great YouTube video promotion is nothing without keyword research. Make sure to go ahead for it to keep the video on top in search results.

2. Pay attention to description and Tags

While thinking how to promote YouTube videos, it is important to pay heed on the video description and tags . The motive of YouTube description is to expand on the main title and putting more detailed information to it. You need to make sure to keep the description long and incorporate the maximum keywords possible (don’t be stuffy) while writing the description. Besides, when you add a web address in the description, ensure to begin it with “http” to make it clickable. Viewers will then easily be redirected to it on clicking. A yet another tip to promote YouTube video is to add tags that can describe the video purpose.

3. Make high quality content

High-quality content is the key to have great and exceptional results out of your video. Make sure to keep the video highly informational and once you’re ready with the content, work on the YouTube SEO . Start looking for the relevant keywords and put these in the title, description, tags and wherever needed.

4. Connect with YouTube community

Connecting with the viewers and YouTube community is the next step for promoting YouTube videos without paying. You create video, upload it and now people like it and make time for commenting on it. How would your audience feel if you won’t respond them back? They will obviously feel ignored. Therefore, try to be actively involved with the audience by replying to their comments as this will keep your audience intact.

Furthermore, make time to find the similar niche community and get engage with them. Watch their videos and activities and drop comments on their videos. Also, try to share useful video links through comments section.

5. Run a contest in your video

Why don’t give your best shot on contest strategy to fascinate more audience? Well! This is an extremely interesting technique to engage the audience. You should try to motivate viewers to subscribe your channel and provide with giveaways and prizes in return. They will willingly go for it and spread the contest thing to their friends as well. After all, everyone on this planet cherishes free stuff. Hence, use this promotion strategy and run contest thereby cheering your audience to step ahead. Remember to follow YouTube’s contest rules .

6. Cross-promoting your video

Do you know that over 500 years of YouTube videos are successfully watched on Facebook on regular basis? Also, Twitter users are involved in sharing over 700 YouTube videos every minute, according to YouTube. Therefore, using the other social platforms and marketing your YouTube channel there stand a great chance for your success. Cross-promoting YouTube video are likely to get viral quickly with top ways to promote YouTube videos .

7. Thumbnails is a must

Thumbnail is equally important as the title and content of the video. And to promote YouTube Video and make it success-deserving, thumbnail plays as an important aspect. There is no rule to create thumbnail. If you like, you can customize thumbnail with Filmora. You should be creative and think out of the box to make it more appealing. Play with image, layouts, designs and add understandable text on your video thumbnail.

8. Add Calls To Action

Do work on CTAs if you want your video to be YouTube video promoted in a better way. While people watch your video, remin-d them or ask them to like the video and subscribe to your channel. In addition, tell them to share the video as maximum as possible to help others too. Popular YouTubers have embraced this Call-to-action approach and they experience increasing number of shares by just asking the existing subscribers for it.

Part 2: Bonus Tip: How to Promote YouTube Videos with Some Money

Don’t forget email marketing

Use video on email marketing is never an outdated idea and here you can use it too in order to promote YouTube videos. To get to the loyal audience through this strategy, you can follow multiple ways:

• Have an email subscriber list already? Then make use of it and spread the news about your creative YouTube channel to the people in the list. You can do this every time you publish a fresh video.
• Also, make sure to keep the intro and outro of the playlist appealing rather than working on each video and adding CTA. By palying with intro/outro, make your viewers acquaint with your email list and tell them to subscribe.
• Above all, it is always suggested whenever you think about promoting your YouTubr video to always add a CTA. Here, when you use email as marketing platform, ask your audience to subscribe to your email list in the last.

Advertise

One of the golden tips – “Advertise and make your views rise” that can be of great assistance. Also, make sure of the following tips if you are thinking about advertising of your video and channel.

• Firstly, you should know that the duration of the ad matters. Keep the advertisement small, 30 to 60 seconds to be precise.
• Secondly and importantly, don’t forget to provide clear call-to-action. Let your viewers know what to do next. You can add subscribe the channel or sign up for email or simply share the video etc. as effective CTAs.
• The third tip says you to take help of TrueView ad format. TrueView In-display ads are evident in watch pages of YouTube where the viewers have their recommended videos and other suggested videos (on the right side). These ads go with the “cost-per-view” concept i.e. when users opt to watch your video by clicking on it, you will be charged. Overall, TrueView stands as great way to get your video marketed.

We enlightened you how to promote YouTube videos without paying and even shared some tips on promotion through money. Now that you’ve got a fair idea, work on the aforementioned methods and make your video known worldwide. Make use of the strategies and we hope you will surely make a remarkable name of yours. Hope you liked the tips we shared and started promoting YouTube videos.

Ollie Mattison

Ollie Mattison is a writer and a lover of all things video.

Follow @Ollie Mattison