How to Light Your Smartphone Videos Like a Pro (3 Easy Steps)

0:00If you're tired of filming on your smartphone and your lighting looking like this, let me show you how with three simple lights you can elevate your videos to look something like this. The lighting looks really great now. There's some texture in my lighting scene. There's even a cool creative color in the background. And all of this is only using three simple lights. Now, for this whole video, I'm just recording on my front-facing selfie camera on my iPhone Air. So, it's a pretty basic setup. I have like a $26 phone tripod, and that's it for the camera tech. But really where the magic happens is by adding these

0:30different lights in this scene. And I'm going to show you how to set all of this up in three easy steps. So, step one is your key light. And your key light is going to be the largest light source that actually lights you as your subject. And so, right now I have a nice large softbox set up right here. It's a light from Amaran. But you don't have to purchase this light. I will link all of these products down in the description below I'm using. I'm using the Amaran 60D right now to light myself for the scene. But I'll even link a Mount Dog softbox, it's like $50, in the

0:58description of this video, which will achieve a similar effect. So, obviously right now I'm very dark, and my background is the brightest part of the image, which is not good. Typically, if you're recording yourself, you want to be the brightest part of your image. You want to be the focal point because you're actually talking to the camera. So, right now I have a little app that is controlling all of the lights that are in my scene. And I'm just going to turn on the key light so you can see the difference that this makes. I'll turn that on with one quick press of a button. And right here is what that

1:25exposure is doing. Look at how bright this light is, how soft the light is, because of the large softbox that I'm using. And ironically, it's actually called the Light Dome Mini. And I have some other softboxes that are even larger. But you can see even a mini, quote unquote, softbox, how much that improves the lighting of this scene and

1:42just makes me look properly exposed. Now, for positioning your key light properly, typically you don't want it to be directly in front of your camera because then it will light yourself super evenly. And typically you want a little bit of shadow and texture on the fill side of your face. So, you can see right now, as I look directly in the camera, this side of my face there's a little bit of shadows, which actually creates depth to my lighting. That is what you want, and you can achieve this result really easily. Just position your key light about 40 to 45° from the position of your camera. So, if I'm

2:14looking directly at my camera, and that's like 0°, just position that about 45° away from yourself, and that will produce some nice texture and shadows on your face. Now, the second light that I'm going to add in this scene is what we call a rim light or a hair light or a back light. It has a bunch of different names, but effectively, the goal of this light is to make myself stand out a little bit more from my background. And I intentionally wore this kind of gray tan colored shirt because it's a similar color to my background and my walls and this couch over here. And so, if I turn

2:45off my key light for just a second, you can see that. It's very easy, my shoulder just kind of blends in with the couch and the carpet and the wall back here. That is not ideal, but what a back light or a hair light does is just give you a little bit of separation by using lighting to create depth. So, I'll turn on my back light right now, and that's the only light that I'll have on. And you can see what it does is increases that exposure right there, so that my shirt doesn't just become kind of muddy with the background. So, I'll just turn this light on and off a couple times so

3:14you can see what it's doing. It just adds a nice little rim on my shoulders and on my hat. And if you actually have hair, and you know, you guys, you don't even know. You're like, "Hey, Craig actually has hair." Look at that stuff. That's wild right there. But, if we had this light off, you can see that my hair just kind of gets lost in the shuffle, and we can add that light back in. And then, as you pair it with the key light, it's creating a nice depth to the scene in terms of lighting. I'll turn off the hair light for just a second. You can

3:40see I'm kind of getting a little bit dark. You can see this is a dark background right here. My hair kind of blends in right with that. But, if we turn back on the hair light, boom, a nice little hair light. How fun. So, to achieve a back hair light kind of effect like this, usually one of the easiest ways that I do it is with something called a C-stand. This is just a really heavy-duty light stand that has sort of an articulating arm on it that you can rig up a bunch of different kinds of accessories on, but I just mounted an Amaran Ace 25c light on that and then

4:09turn it at like 35% power to achieve this hair light. You can also create this kind of effect with a simple light stand by positioning a light directly behind you so you actually cover the entirety of the stand and the light in the frame. This is usually a lot easier and more affordable than purchasing a C-stand. Honestly, for this scene I could kind of just stop right here, but I did add a background light in this scene using my Amaran Pano 60c. This is a 60-W panel light that's full RGB color. And a lot of times I like adding a little splash of color for just some

4:42energy and vibrancy in my scene. So, I'll go ahead and turn that on right here and you can see this is only 11% power with the Pano 60c. These things are very bright and they come with a few different lighting modification options, too. You can actually purchase a full kit of these that come with the light stands and two of the panel lights and all of the modifiers that are needed to create a nice two-point lighting kit, but I'm currently just using one of those as my background fill with the RGB setting. And if you change the colors around and increase the intensity, this is only 45% intensity and I'm just kind

5:13of scrolling around in the app changing the colors. Like I can make this thing like a completely red dungeon room. I mean, this is kind of scary. Gives me like Sith Lord vibes. Uh but I like the blue personally. I mean, this is way too blue and this is 40%. That's why I had to have the light around 11% so it's just a little more subtle. So, this is what our scene looks like now only with those three lights and let me show you again what it looked like before with no lighting on other than the house lights that were on overhead. The shot obviously is very dark. It's kind of

5:41noisy and then when you add those other lights into the scene, it really elevates your video look. And if you want to, you could always add some creative accent lights as well. Like I have these little bar lights that I sometimes have on in the background. You can just turn those on with a little remote like this. I'll link these in the

5:54description or similar lights like it. It can add a nice little creative flavor to your lighting look if you want those. Now, if you already have some lighting, but you still feel like you can't nail the look and feel of your videos, there's a few common mistakes that we see with creators, especially who are filming on their smartphone, that can cause your lighting in your scene and your videos to not look very good. The first is recording in the wrong frame rate. And usually, if you're recording a talking head style video like this, you want to be shooting in either 24 or 30 frames per second. And this is not only

6:24because this is just the most common frame rate for talking head style videos, and it's going to get you like the proper motion blur for your videos. All of those things are important. But additionally, if you're shooting in a higher frame rate, like 60 frames per second or 120 frames per second, your shutter speed in your automatic camera settings is going to be way too fast, and that's going to mess with the lighting in your scene, and maybe even create some weird flicker, depending on what kind of lights you're using. So, be sure to record in either 24 or 30 frames per second for your videos. Another

6:53common mistake is not having the setting lock white balance turned on. And if you don't have this on, this means your camera's going to try to re-white balance your scene every time the color shift at all, or maybe more of your shirt comes in the frame, or the lighting changes just a little bit. If you don't have lock white balance on, your colors can shift a whole bunch while you're recording, so you could try turning this setting on. Additionally, you can actually tap on your screen and click and hold to automatically lock the autofocus and the exposure of your scene. This way, your exposure isn't changing a whole bunch while you're

7:25recording videos. And there's even a little brightness slider. You can turn your brightness up or down just a little bit to get that proper exposure that feels right for your video. And finally, one more really common mistake we see for beginners is mixing color temperatures for your lighting. So, maybe your house lighting is like a little bit warmer, closer to a 3200

7:45Kelvin temperature on the Kelvin scale. And then maybe your studio lights are a cooler color temperature, closer to daylight color, which is 5600 Kelvin. And the disparity here between your light color temperatures sometimes confuses smartphones or even cameras that are trying to automatically expose for the difference in white balance. So that can make your skin tones look really off and the colors just look really bad in your videos. So ideally, you can try to have have most of the color temperature in your scene be the same color temperature unless you are intentionally trying to add a splash of color in your scene. Like what I'm doing

8:18here with the blue, I could also change that to a warmer color if I wanted some warmth in the scene. But that needs to be an intentional decision. You don't want to just mix a bunch of different color temperatures for no reason. So if you can avoid some of these common mistakes, it really can help your videos look a lot better. So that's a basic tutorial of how using three simple lights, you can really elevate the look and feel of your videos. Now if you want to check out some other YouTube studio gear that I love using that's super affordable, you can go ahead and click

8:45or tap the screen right here to watch that video and I'll see you in the next one.