Using Lighting to Enhance Your Scene: A Guide

Knowing how to use lighting can make a huge difference in creating an interesting and well-lit scene. While hanging objects off the wall is a great way to add visual interest, incorporating actual lighting can take your scene to the next level.

I recently got an LED strip with RGB capabilities for the back of my desk, which I can set to pretty much any color. This adds a warm glow to my workspace and creates a cozy atmosphere. The light used as a baseline at the beginning of the video is actually just the ceiling light in my house, but I've found that it gives me an unfair advantage when it comes to this lighting setup.

Japanese homes often feature lights with a built-in remote, allowing you to dim them and adjust the refresh rate or flicker speed. This provides more control over the lighting and helps prevent interference with your camera. With all that in mind, let's take a look at some examples of how I've used lighting in my setup.

I'm using Anna as a subject because she looks better illuminated than me. To start, this is the baseline – just the young newer wine 300 light on. As you can see, she's well-lit, but it looks pretty harsh and her face is slightly blown out. Now, let's adjust the light to make it softer and more flattering.

[Image: Softened lighting with a more even distribution]

With this new light setup, Anna looks much better illuminated, and her features are more defined. The soft light complements her skin tone, making her look really pretty. Now, let's add some color to our scene with the LED strip behind my desk turned on.

[Image: RGB LED strip added to the back of the desk]

While it doesn't have a huge effect on the overall lighting, the LED strip adds a pleasing touch and creates a unique ambiance. I've also set up a softbox next to my tripod to provide more control over the light.

[I apologize for the distraction in the background – the softbox is positioned here.]

Using this softbox allows me to get the light really close to where I'm sitting, ensuring it doesn't lose any of its power. One important effect of this lighting setup is proper subject isolation from the background. When using a single light source, like my presenter and the background blur into one, making it difficult to separate them.

[Image: Proper subject isolation with different light levels]

In contrast, with our setup, I have a light specifically illuminating me, while the background has a different brightness, creating a nice separation between us. This helps keep the viewer's focus on the presenter and creates a more visually appealing image.

That's all for today's video – thank you for watching if you liked it, be sure to like and subscribe to my channel. If you disliked it or have some hate comments below, they're always entertaining. Otherwise, thanks again for watching, goodbye!

WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhello and welcome to hard-on Hardware where today I'm going to show you how to take your lighting setup from this to this for less than a hundred and fifty dollars everybody wants to start a YouTube channel these days including me and it's quite difficult to know what equipment to actually invest in to get the best result for your videos one of the first things people look at is getting a fancy camera and this is actually quite a good bet because you know a good camera can go a long way but having the best camera with the widest aperture lens can't actually overcome the fact that most of us are filming in our homes which often have some pretty terrible lighting that's why I think spending a bit of money on some decent lighting will improve the results of your videos massively now once you make this realization that you need to get some new lighting it can be really difficult to actually know what to buy there are many different options and there are many different sources that tell you all kinds of things about what to get one of the ones that helped me the most is a YouTube channel called DSLR video shooter and he has many videos with all kinds of different lighting setups in them and he tests a large variety of lights and many different budgets to give you a rough idea of what light you need to use for your application now the light that I ended up going with for my setup is called the young new oyn 300 it's the mark 3 version which comes with a little remote that looks like this which is really useful especially when you have your light up in a softbox so you don't have to tear the softbox open to turn it off and on every time the light is very powerful and it's actually fairly cheap the light comes with pretty much everything you need in the box it even comes with a ball mount but I have to warn you this ball mount is pretty terrible and it's one of the first things that I'd replace with it and then one final thing to keep in mind with this actual light is that it doesn't come with any way to actually power it so you have to either buy an NP F battery for it or you can use a power cable which I did which means you can pretty much have the light on 24/7 without you having to worry about changing out batteries after that I got a light stand and a softbox the softbox that I got is a newer octagonal softbox I don't really know what it's called but I'll have a link to it in the video description now one thing to be careful of with the softbox is I didn't realize how absolutely massive it is it's the 47 centimeter model but it really is huge one of my main concerns with the softbox is that in the product description it actually says that it's a softbox four flashes which worried me a little because it has this reflective material inside which I didn't know how well this would play with an actual video night but the thing is in actually worked out really well because it technically offers two levels of confusion you can just shoot it through straight through the kind of white diffusion material and if you need more diffusion you can turn the light around in the softbox and reflect it off the shiny material and then through the diffusion fabric and it gives you a really really beautiful soft light although you need some power and then after getting all of this light selection out the way I realize that my background is still a bit bland and you know I can go and hang a bunch of stuff off the wall but how about using some actual lighting to make the scene a little bit more interesting and also brighten it up a bit so I ended up getting an LED strip an RGB LED strip for the back of my desk which I can set pretty much any color and it adds a little bit of warmth to see just as a bit of a disclaimer the light that I used as a baseline in the beginning of the video I'm actually using as a fill at the moment and it is a light that's on the ceiling in my house and I think it gives me a little bit of an unfair advantage when it comes to this lighting setup because the lights in Japanese homes are really really great they come with this little remote that you can kind of dim it with and you can there you can see what it looks like with the light from Kiki off and here it is fully on it also has a switch where you can toggle the refresh rate or the hurt at which the hurts rather at which the leds flicker so that it doesn't interfere with your with your actual camera now with all of that out the way let's have a look at some examples now I'm going to be using Anna as a subject because I think she's way better to look at than me now this is the baseline this is the light in the house and this is the setup that most of you will be filming at if you don't have any lighting setup in your house so this is what it looks like if you just have the young newer wine 300 light on as you can see she's way better illuminated but it looks pretty harsh and her face is a little bit blown out oh there we go that's a lot better now the light is a lot softer she's much better illuminated and well she looks really pretty because the soft light complements her and I can see you getting offended there and because you're beautiful obviously as well and now this is what it looks like with the LED strip behind the desk turned on now it doesn't have a huge effect on the actual overall lighting but it is quite a cheap addition to the kit and I think it has quite a pleasing effect because it adds a bit of color and here is an example of how I set up the light for my filming now I've got this softbox set up pretty much right next to the tripod over here and it means that I can get the light really close to where I'm sitting so that I don't lose any of its power and I do apologize for all the all the stuff over there so the light is actually in here it's in here and as you can see it I'm not using the reflective material in the back I'm just actually pointing it straight through the material here and unfortunately you're back looking at me now as you can see each component playing quite a big role in the actual overall effect of this lighting setup now you don't necessarily have to get a softbox for diffusion you can get a number Li instead which will cost a lot less but you're not gonna have as much flexibility for diffusion is you do with this huge monstrosity of a of of a soft box so you can chop and change the components depending on your budget but I would recommend this as a minimum Center what I think is one of the most important effects of this actual lighting setup is proper subject isolation from the background now when you have the top light as your only light source me the presenter and the background pretty much blur into one and even if you have quite a polka wide aperture lens it's really difficult to separate the subject from the background and it means that it's quite a flat image but whereas with this I have a light specifically illuminating me and I have a different brightness of light illuminating the background which means that I'm kind of popping out of the image a lot more so this is something that is really important and it helps to keep the actual viewers focus on the present and with that we've come to the end of the video thank you very much for watching if you liked the video do like and subscribe to the channel if you disliked it dislike the video who needs some hate comments below they're always fairly entertaining anyways thank you very much for watching goodbyehello and welcome to hard-on Hardware where today I'm going to show you how to take your lighting setup from this to this for less than a hundred and fifty dollars everybody wants to start a YouTube channel these days including me and it's quite difficult to know what equipment to actually invest in to get the best result for your videos one of the first things people look at is getting a fancy camera and this is actually quite a good bet because you know a good camera can go a long way but having the best camera with the widest aperture lens can't actually overcome the fact that most of us are filming in our homes which often have some pretty terrible lighting that's why I think spending a bit of money on some decent lighting will improve the results of your videos massively now once you make this realization that you need to get some new lighting it can be really difficult to actually know what to buy there are many different options and there are many different sources that tell you all kinds of things about what to get one of the ones that helped me the most is a YouTube channel called DSLR video shooter and he has many videos with all kinds of different lighting setups in them and he tests a large variety of lights and many different budgets to give you a rough idea of what light you need to use for your application now the light that I ended up going with for my setup is called the young new oyn 300 it's the mark 3 version which comes with a little remote that looks like this which is really useful especially when you have your light up in a softbox so you don't have to tear the softbox open to turn it off and on every time the light is very powerful and it's actually fairly cheap the light comes with pretty much everything you need in the box it even comes with a ball mount but I have to warn you this ball mount is pretty terrible and it's one of the first things that I'd replace with it and then one final thing to keep in mind with this actual light is that it doesn't come with any way to actually power it so you have to either buy an NP F battery for it or you can use a power cable which I did which means you can pretty much have the light on 24/7 without you having to worry about changing out batteries after that I got a light stand and a softbox the softbox that I got is a newer octagonal softbox I don't really know what it's called but I'll have a link to it in the video description now one thing to be careful of with the softbox is I didn't realize how absolutely massive it is it's the 47 centimeter model but it really is huge one of my main concerns with the softbox is that in the product description it actually says that it's a softbox four flashes which worried me a little because it has this reflective material inside which I didn't know how well this would play with an actual video night but the thing is in actually worked out really well because it technically offers two levels of confusion you can just shoot it through straight through the kind of white diffusion material and if you need more diffusion you can turn the light around in the softbox and reflect it off the shiny material and then through the diffusion fabric and it gives you a really really beautiful soft light although you need some power and then after getting all of this light selection out the way I realize that my background is still a bit bland and you know I can go and hang a bunch of stuff off the wall but how about using some actual lighting to make the scene a little bit more interesting and also brighten it up a bit so I ended up getting an LED strip an RGB LED strip for the back of my desk which I can set pretty much any color and it adds a little bit of warmth to see just as a bit of a disclaimer the light that I used as a baseline in the beginning of the video I'm actually using as a fill at the moment and it is a light that's on the ceiling in my house and I think it gives me a little bit of an unfair advantage when it comes to this lighting setup because the lights in Japanese homes are really really great they come with this little remote that you can kind of dim it with and you can there you can see what it looks like with the light from Kiki off and here it is fully on it also has a switch where you can toggle the refresh rate or the hurt at which the hurts rather at which the leds flicker so that it doesn't interfere with your with your actual camera now with all of that out the way let's have a look at some examples now I'm going to be using Anna as a subject because I think she's way better to look at than me now this is the baseline this is the light in the house and this is the setup that most of you will be filming at if you don't have any lighting setup in your house so this is what it looks like if you just have the young newer wine 300 light on as you can see she's way better illuminated but it looks pretty harsh and her face is a little bit blown out oh there we go that's a lot better now the light is a lot softer she's much better illuminated and well she looks really pretty because the soft light complements her and I can see you getting offended there and because you're beautiful obviously as well and now this is what it looks like with the LED strip behind the desk turned on now it doesn't have a huge effect on the actual overall lighting but it is quite a cheap addition to the kit and I think it has quite a pleasing effect because it adds a bit of color and here is an example of how I set up the light for my filming now I've got this softbox set up pretty much right next to the tripod over here and it means that I can get the light really close to where I'm sitting so that I don't lose any of its power and I do apologize for all the all the stuff over there so the light is actually in here it's in here and as you can see it I'm not using the reflective material in the back I'm just actually pointing it straight through the material here and unfortunately you're back looking at me now as you can see each component playing quite a big role in the actual overall effect of this lighting setup now you don't necessarily have to get a softbox for diffusion you can get a number Li instead which will cost a lot less but you're not gonna have as much flexibility for diffusion is you do with this huge monstrosity of a of of a soft box so you can chop and change the components depending on your budget but I would recommend this as a minimum Center what I think is one of the most important effects of this actual lighting setup is proper subject isolation from the background now when you have the top light as your only light source me the presenter and the background pretty much blur into one and even if you have quite a polka wide aperture lens it's really difficult to separate the subject from the background and it means that it's quite a flat image but whereas with this I have a light specifically illuminating me and I have a different brightness of light illuminating the background which means that I'm kind of popping out of the image a lot more so this is something that is really important and it helps to keep the actual viewers focus on the present and with that we've come to the end of the video thank you very much for watching if you liked the video do like and subscribe to the channel if you disliked it dislike the video who needs some hate comments below they're always fairly entertaining anyways thank you very much for watching goodbye