Strategies for Adequate Lighting in YouTube Videos

How To Light Your YouTube Video

Richard Bennett

Oct 26, 2023• Proven solutions

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.

Table of Contents Using Light You Already Have Window Lighting Home Lighting Home Studio Lighting Light Control 3-Point Lighting 4-Point Lighting

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.

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Unleash Potential: A Comprehensive Guide to YouTube Backlink Building

YouTube is the world’s 2nd most visited site. That means achieving a higher ranking can be beneficial for you. YouTube SEO can help you to boost traffic, get more views, and achieve higher rankings. In this article, we’ll explain what YouTube backlinks are and the safest way to get them.

What Are YouTube Backlinks?

Links between other sites to your YouTube videos are referred to as YouTube backlinks. Backlinks are crucial to growing traffic, increasing discovery speed, and improving ranks. Backlinks are almost akin to a site’s reputation as they can act as a vote of confidence for the quality of your videos.

The content of a video with more backlinks is seen as more valuable by search engines than those with less, as each backlink adds confidence that the video is worth linking to.

The popularity of the sites linking to a YouTube video also plays a part as they naturally lead to increased traffic coming to sites through backlinks. Search engines often check popular videos for new backlinks leading to the quick discovery of new content.

The quality of backlinks significantly impacts the ranking and visibility of a given video. Search engines consider links from relevant sources as more valuable as people are more likely to click them.

Lastly, placement and formatting of links play a part as a link that stands out is more likely to generate traffic than one that doesn’t.

Are YouTube Backlinks Important?

Yes. Backlinks are one of the vital aspects of SEO. They are essential to ranking well in Google search results, and they also help you stay ahead of your competition.

Backlinks act as a powerful source to attract your target audience. While getting people to your might be challenging, sending them to your other work is a breeze. You only have to include YouTube backlinks for free to do so. With 65% of people being visual learners, YouTube is a resourceful place for using backlinks.

How Can I Get YouTube Backlinks for My Videos?

Getting high-quality backlinks can be challenging if you don’t know how to do it. The good news is that there are many different methods that you can use to get links that will benefit your YouTube videos; all it takes is a little creativity.

With that in mind, here are some of the safest ways of getting YouTube backlinks for free for your videos.

Guest Vlogging

If you have a large social media following or even just a few loyal subscribers on YouTube, consider using that to your advantage. Many bloggers and popular vloggers will allow guest appearances in their videos — as long as they also get something out of it. If you are a vlogger in a specific niche, you could guest vlog for someone well-known in your niche, or anyone with higher ranking videos than yours.

Posting original content on social media sites is also a great way to get high-quality backlinks for free. People will click your links, and this can help you to get more views and subscribers too. Many bloggers and vloggers often post the videos they feature on their social media platforms.

Web 2.0 Sites

The use of Web 2.0 sites is a great way to get backlinks for your YouTube videos. Web 2.0 sites, such as Squarespace, Blogger, Blog, Weebly, and WordPress allow you to embed your videos. You can post original content on these sites, which will then link back to yours. So this makes them powerful links indeed.

Incorporate such websites into your marketing strategy and then target your keywords correctly to get more user engagement. In turn, both your site and embedded video will rank on the top page of search engines, meaning you will rank for that particular search query.

Pinterest Video Pins

Pinterest video pins are another great option. They are simply a link to your YouTube video placed on the Pinterest site. With over 320 million monthly active users and more than 200 billion pins saved, this is a great way to get YouTube backlinks for free. It also helps you grow your following.

Creating backlinks using Pinterest video pins can help you tell a story about your brand, idea, or project. Video pins attract and grab the attention of your audience using a cover image. What’s more? You can create video adverts to advertise on Pinterest.

Unlinked Mentions

The use of unlinked mentions means that whenever someone writes about a YouTube video without linking it back, you provide them with a link yourself; this is a great way to obtain YouTube backlinks for free.

● Questions: Is it safe to buy YouTube backlinks?

● No, it is not. You should not buy backlinks because it’s against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. If you get caught, you will get a Google penalty for trying to cheat the system.

A Few More SEO Factors for YouTube SEO

Quality of Your Videos

YouTube and Google rank high-quality HD videos higher than those of low quality. Use Filmora to create and edit your videos before uploading them to YouTube.

The software allows you to change the resolution of your videos; it has a range of resolution settings you can choose from to enhance the quality of your videos. You can also adjust the contrast, brightness, tint, and saturation of your videos.

Moreover, you can cut a section in the middle of a video and remove the shake from videos. Additionally, the program allows you to trim, crop, rotate and join videos.

The best part is: You don’t need to be tech-savvy to know how to use this software. It is easy to use and has an aesthetically pleasing interface.

Versatile Video Editor - Wondershare Filmora

An easy yet powerful editor

Numerous effects to choose from

Detailed tutorials provided by the official channel

Help you create high-quality YouTube video

Try It Free Try It Free

Video Title

The title of your video has a significant effect on your YouTube SEO. Including your target keyword in your title will help your video rank higher. A compelling title also drives a high CTR (click-through rate). However, you should avoid creating clickbait titles, as this can hurt your ranking.

Engagement

YouTube ranking also depends on how viewers engage with your video. If users watch, share, like, and comment on your videos, Google and YouTube will give them a priority. As such, the more engagement your videos receive, the higher they will rank.

YouTube Tags

Tags allow YouTube to know what your video is about. For this reason, your first tag should be the target keyword. You should also include variations of the target keyword when adding tags.

Conclusion

Using these methods can help you gain high-quality links to boost your YouTube SEO and increase views and subscribers to your channel. Keeping this in mind, the quality of your video is one of the ranking factors. Use Filmora to edit and create HD videos that will get on top of search results.

02 [Are YouTube Backlinks Important?](#Part 2)

03 [How Can I Get YouTube Backlinks for My Videos?](#Part 3)

04 [A Few More SEO Factors for YouTube SEO](#Part 4)

What Are YouTube Backlinks?

The content of a video with more backlinks is seen as more valuable by search engines than those with less, as each backlink adds confidence that the video is worth linking to.

Lastly, placement and formatting of links play a part as a link that stands out is more likely to generate traffic than one that doesn’t.

Are YouTube Backlinks Important?

Yes. Backlinks are one of the vital aspects of SEO. They are essential to ranking well in Google search results, and they also help you stay ahead of your competition.