SonyDoug

Maybe a bit off topic for this forum.

Problem is with my wife who has light skin tone. On our older Dell laptop she appears to have an over exposed almost ghost like look to her face. I wonder about using some type of filter over the laptop's built in camera to give her more natural skin tone. Any ideas?

The Windows 10 settings for the camera are limited. And we've tried various room lighting with not much luck or affect on skin tone. Lighting suggestions?

All the various family members joining our weekly Zooms are using newish Apple computers and don't seem to have this issue.

petrochemist Loc: UK

I don't know of any adjustments that can be made to the camera settings on laptops - there may be options here such as spot metering or exposure compensation that will get round the issue.

Otherwise changing the background/lighting is probably what's needed.
The computer is trying to make the overal image neutral, with a dark background this might be causing it to overexpose. A board or curtain behind her is possibly the easiest option I'd start with something close to 18% grey & tweak the shade slightly or light it if required.

bleirer

I guess I'd start with manually updating the camera driver. I think you can find it by typing device manager in the search box. Find the camera and drill down to click where you can click update driver. Then try the camera settings again. Second I'd try having something white in the camera's view. Seems weird but wearing a white shirt or having something white on a bookshelf can affect the exposure but mostly the white balance. Finally, external webcams are pretty inexpensive and come with software to adjust exposure that might give a better result.

joehel2 Loc: Cherry Hill, NJ

I went into settings and reduced my computer display brightness. On my Dell, the default brightness is 100%, the computer screen was the only light pointed at my face. I dropped it to 50% and my face doesn’t look overexposed when I’m on a Zoom meeting.

Ourspolair

Try a Wratten 87 filter. Used to use them a lot for warming skintones in the early days of digital. They were very popular when film was king. Any warming filter should do the trick.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

You could expose for her face and then adjust the rest of the image. Using the shadows slider might accomplish that. Shooting in raw will help.

bleirer

OP is talking about computer's built in camera for a video meeting.

petrochemist Loc: UK

The #87 is an infra red only filter.
The various #81, #85 & #86 filters are the warming ones.

I suspect the computers AWB routine might counteract the effect of any warming filter, but they certainly would have done the trick in film days..

larryepage Loc: North Texas area

I had the opposite problem in a meeting this morning. White background and no light from the window I usually use as a fill caused me to be too dark.

My suggestion is to set up a white background, which should bring exposure down and render her face better exposed.

HRPufnstuf

As a last resort, perhaps heavy makeup. Or maybe a Halloween costume!

Canisdirus

Buy a sun lamp.

amfoto1 Loc: San Jose, Calif. USA

It would be really helpful if you could post an example image here. We could give you much better feedback, I'm sure.

Skin tones can be difficult to "get right". Often on an automatic white balance setting (AWB) images will be too "cool".

One solution is to set a Custom White Balance in the camera with Warm Cards (https://www.vortexmediastore.com/pages/warmcards-white-balance-system). This has the same effect as using a "warming filter" did back in the days of film.

If you use an actual warming filter screwed onto your lens, but have your camera set to auto white balance, that will cancel out the filter's effect. To use an actual filter, you have to first set a custom white balance without the filter installed, then add the filter to insure it actually has an effect. But there's no need to do that... No need to buy filters. Instead, it's simpler and easier just to use one of the above Warm Cards to set a custom white balance that's slightly biased to be warmer. (You also could just take the image without a custom white balance, then adjust the color rendition later in post-processing... however, this is best done with a RAW file, rather than a JPEG, because RAW files allow for more and better adjustments. But, also see below about monitor calibration, which is very important if you want to do accurate image editing.)

It really depends upon the ambient light conditions you're dealing with. For example, in shade or indoors by window light alone, things tend to come out somewhat bluish and "cool"... so one of the Warm Cards in three different strengths can be used (the light cyan colored cards). Or, if you're shooting under tungsten light, chances are it will be too warm and one of the cooling (pale yellow cards) filters can be used to set a custom white balance to help correct it. Or, if you're shooting under fluorescent lamps, those often give a weird tint that the "minus green" card can help counteract. In addition the Warm Cards set includes pure white and neutral gray cards that can be used to set an unbiased custom white balance, as well as an accurate exposure.

Another thing is that your computer monitor may be "lying to you" when you're looking at your photos. If it's not calibrated, it's probably way too bright for accurate photo evaluation. Most monitors are. That will cause light tonalities, like fair skin tones, to blow out. An uncalibrated and overly bright monitor that's giving you an incorrect rendering of images will cause you to make them too dark, which may not be apparent to you until you print them. A solution is to look at the image on a properly calibrated monitor, either by calibrating your own or viewing it on someone else's calibrated monitor (a key reason it would be really helpful of you were to upload an example image here, since some of us use calibrated monitors)

There are monitors that are good for photo editing and others, well, not so much. Most monitors tend to "clip" both the lightest and darkest tonalities. This can be especially bad with monitors NOT really intended for photo or graphics art work. Office computer monitors, gaming monitors, etc. often have too narrow a color gamut and insufficient dynamic range. They're fine for less demanding work... such as spreadsheets or video games... but can be lousy for photo evaluation and editing.

Finally, you may have mismatched color spaces, working against each other. For example, if your image was taken in Adobe RGB color space but is being viewed in sRGB... or vice versa. Some color spaces look "washed out" and "desaturated" when viewed in another color space. Whatever you are using to view the image has to be a pretty good match (FYI, most online image display and photo quality inkjet printers work best with sRGB color space, but a lot of us prefer to shoot Adobe RGB, and may even use even wider ProPhoto color space while editing our images, then change the final image color space as required by the use that's planned for it).

So, again, upload an example of one of your image here and we can probably give you much better feedback about it.

When you upload here on UHH, be sure that the embedded image EXIF remains intact (don't use "save for the web" feature in some software). You may need to resize image, because UHH limits to something like 20MB. Then use the image upload link under the post text box and be sure to check "save original", so that we can see the enlarged, final version of image.

cahale Loc: San Angelo, TX

Definitely. Switch to a camera to take pictures.

bleirer

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MadMikeOne Loc: So. NJ Shore - a bit west of Atlantic City

Alan, the OP is talking about the camera built into a computer for the purpose of ZOOM meetings.