Make Your Streaming Camera Look Pro! (A Guide for Lighting and Color Correction)

so you just bought yourself a camera for your twitch stream you plug it in and it looks like this it looks blurry it looks dark it basically looks like you're you know you're streaming inside the hospital so today let's spend some time go through everything that I did to change my camera from looking bumped in like this into something that looks a lot more professional whatever that means I don't know I'm like I'm literally sitting here without my pants on but you know I think using the word professional works really well for the YouTube algorithm I know some of you were probably thinking nutty you're obviously using one of those faints you try hard cameras and I only got a USB camera don't worry I haven't left you guys as well because I've also got a Logitech c920 too and pretty much everything that I do today is going to apply and no matter what camera using weather using this camera or you're using this camera so here's how this videos gonna work we're gonna start off talking briefly about what settings you want to change on your camera and we're gonna start talking about lights like what kind of lights to buy and where to put them around you then finally we're gonna add a little little sizzle I don't know why I'm clicking with my mouth we're gonna look at how you can use a program called DaVinci Resolve which you can get for free to color great your camera and trust me you're gonna want to pay attention to this because it makes a massive difference to your camera so let me preface this video hold on count down pick there we go let me preface this video by saying that I am definitely not a professional even though I used the word Pro in the title so if there any of you camera nerds in the comment section let me know just leave a comment saying like hey you suck I just want to share my experience so that you guys don't have to fall into the same traps that I did when I set up my camera with that being said get in the video I'm still clicking my mouth again geez what's up guys nutty before we get started if you guys like this video or you want to see more stream tip videos or anything like that I got more videos lined up so make sure do the whole YouTube subscribe thingy and all that all that YouTube garbage anyway let's all back cameras first thing you should always do is make sure no matter what camera you're using to use manual settings whether you're using a webcam or a DSLR if you're using a webcam that means going to the properties in OBS and making sure you manually set your resolution and framerate so in my case my webcam is 1920 by 1080 and the frame rate goes up to 30fps now if your webcam does have a 60 FPS option please don't use it and let me show you why here's a sample of some 720p 60 footage and then I'm gonna play some 720p 30 footage and notice that even though the resolution is exactly the same and only the frame rate is different the 60 FPS option just looks grainy and blurry and gross and disgusting and even you're also gonna want to go to configure and turn off low-light compensation basically all this does is it sacrifices the framerate of your webcam to make your image look brighter and we're gonna fix that later with lights but we'll get into that in a sec and you're also gonna want turn off auto on your exposure this will make sense later on in the video now if you're on a DSLR or a mirrorless camera that can be a whole nother video on itself so I'm not gonna get into it now but if you want to see a video that goes into detail on camera settings then let me know that TLDR I'm just gonna rattle off some camera nerd stuff set your aperture to the lowest that's thought possible set your shutter speed to 1 over 60 and then set your ISO until your shot is bright enough now if none of that made any sense you just gonna have to go into another video otherwise this video is gonna be like an hour long and most you guys aren't using vs large anyway so we're gonna skip that so right now my camera shooting an auto so let's change it to manual their cameras in manual now let's talk about the next thing lighting the most important thing you're gonna have to realize is no matter what camera you're using you need to make sure that you are properly lit and the first big no-no that I see everyone doing is they only have their ceiling light lighting them and that's no good because all that's gonna do is it's gonna light the top of your head and not your face and that's what you want you want people looking at your face unless you're like super ugly or something so turn off your ceiling lights and get some cheap photography lights it's do a search on Amazon you're basically looking for something that's dimmable and preferably something that allows you to change the color temperature so in my case I went for a couple of newer LED panels they're pretty popular a lot of people use them and they're pretty affordable but they're by no means the only option and there's tons and tons if you just look in Amazon but honestly if I had to do my lighting again I probably wouldn't get these lights not that they don't do a good job but I found these bill trucks VL 200 T lights and they seem to be about the same price but they also come with a remote either way you go you can get like three of these lights for about the same cost as a single Elgato key light so if you get multiple lights go that route I'll leave a link in the description for where you can get both of these lights you can get one two or three I would say get at least two if you can but fee only forward one get one at least someone also hit me up and let me know that you can get a pair of newer 5600 Kelvin lights like $30 oh yeah if you're on a really tight budget you can get two lights $32 and I left a link for that in description as well so now that you have your lights where are you gonna put them and for this there's really no right or wrong way to do it so feel free to experiment but we're gonna go through a two and a three point lighting setup so what the hell does that mean okay first of all stop being so aggressive and second let's bust that the try-hard YouTube cam and I'll show you what my lighting setup looks like okay so this is my streaming setup so right here is where I sit so this is my wife here say say hello honey hi hello yeah that's where I normally sit so the first light I have so this is where my camera is and right behind it is the main light which is what camera nerds call a key light so I put that behind the camera slightly off to the side you're gonna see why I put it slightly off to the side in a second and then about 90 degrees to the left I have another light which is again well camera nerds call a fill light and I'll explain what that does and then behind me I have just an extra light a third light which is just the lamp because I don't have like a like another photography light but it's just a lamp you know like gonna on a stool and this one's what some people call a hair light or a kicker or like a rim light you're gonna see what each of these lights do in a second so back to the streaming setup so back in the stream setup we're gonna turn on each of these three lights one at a time and you're gonna see what difference each of these makes so first thing you do turn off the ceiling light and then we're gonna turn on our key light so ever key light on now is just pointing down at my face remember I said I put it off to the side a bit and I have it raised so it's not directly buying the camera and the reason why I did that is because I liked it off to the side cuz it casts like a nice little shadow underneath my chin so you get that nice the definition and the chin you also notice that by turning off the ceiling lights and having light on me now I'm sticking out more and the background is darker so I'm more separated from the background so that's our key light next thing we're gonna do is turn on our fill light now you can see that with the fill light on you have light shining on the far side of her face so it kind of softens up the shadows and this is just a preference thing but I like to make my fill light brighter than my key light just because I like to have one side of my face brighter than the other so that you can see more contouring in the face well like I said feel free to experiment you might want to make your key light brighter and then your fill light dimmer or maybe you just don't want to have like a you know maybe you don't want to have a key light at all and you want to go for a like a more dramatic look but it's all up to you I'm gonna have my key light on just because I like the way that I look and then the last light is gonna be our hair light and normally I don't even use a hair light but I started experimenting with this just for this video and I think I might use one for my streams now essentially what a hair light does is it shines on top of your head and onto your shoulders so you can get that nice highlight in your hair and on top of your shoulders and it just separates you more from the background and really that's the goal of having all these lights you just want to have you stick out from behind you now what I want to do now is we haven't checked out how the webcam looks so I'm gonna switch to the webcam so the first thing I'm noticing is that our webcam is a little overexposed now and this is why I said we want to use a manual settings for our cameras so real simple all I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go into our camera control and right now my exposure set to -5 let me step down to minus 6 and I think that looks a lot better and then the last thing you might want to do again totally optional but everybody knows right that you're not a real professional unless you have RGB lighting so basically what I did is I picked up a 2-pack of these 30 watt RGB LED lights and I actually I'll show you what they look like so if I turn around basically behind me sorry my wife is sleeping I better keep it down if I go behind me on the floor I basically have these lights and I'll just turn it on and I just basically have them pointing up at the wall and it just paints the entire wall and I have a second one here just on my shelf again pointed towards the wall so if I turn it on I like know how to yeah again it just paints the wall behind me and I just makes your setup just like super duper like professional right and then they also come with like this totally futuristic room actually these are like four remotes taped together but like the super futuristic remote so if you like want to make it like green or something can make it green or I like to keep it purple but yeah you can choose whatever call you won okay so we're sim back data or stream setup and we got the RGB lights behind me and I think we're looking pretty close to finalized so again let's switch back to our webcam see our webcam is doing and honestly our webcam isn't doing as well and you'll notice on both cameras really the colors are pretty good but they look a little flat so now that our lighting situation is sorted let's talk about my favorite part which is color correction work color grading they're technically different but I'm gonna say color grading because it makes it sound like I know what I'm talking about what we're gonna do is we're gonna use something called a LUT and basically what a lot is it's a file that is used to change the way colors are represented in video and it sounds complicated but it's gonna make more sense OBS actually directly supports Luntz so if you right-click on your camera going to filters and go to effect filters you can add something called apply light and when you use this apply LUT filter and click the Browse button you can see a list of files that OBS has included these are Luntz so you can play around without yourself go click on each one see what it does we're actually gonna be creating our own blood next you're too lazy to create your own LUT I'm gonna be uploading the Luntz that I'm about to create onto my discord so if you're too lazy jump into my discord go into the design files section and I'll be uploading them there but I highly recommend sticking around creating your own one because my lighting situations you really different to your lighting situation so it's probably not gonna look right if you just use my ones let me said how are we gonna create a lot so what we're gonna be using is a program called the venturi resolve and if you don't know what DaVinci Resolve is by now it's basically a video editor slash color correction program you do any sort of like video editing you gotta use DaVinci Resolve it's completely free they do have like a pay version but the free version is like real it's amazing it's very powerful so go ahead install it I know the install is pretty big but if you do any sort of content creation whatsoever this is a really powerful tool to have in your arsenal we got the eventual result installed but we're gonna open it up real simple open up a new project and then the first thing you're gonna do go into the second tab a cut tab and we're gonna drag two files into here first it's just gonna be like a really short clip of how your webcam currently looks so just do a quick test recording in OBS and import the file the second is an original dot PNG file this is basically our reference LUT that is included in by default so I'll leave the link to the directory for where you can find it it's already in your OS folder so for me everybody got my short clip so I'm just gonna get them here's one clip and the original PNG file drag it into our media pool then we're gonna highlight both of them and this just drag them onto your timeline next you're gonna go into your color tab which is the fifth tab and this is basically where you're gonna be doing all of your color grading now I'm not gonna talk about how to do color grading because they can literally talk hours about how to do that but I just want to give you guys some point of reference so that you can research for yourself and go on YouTube and look up tutorials because color grading is like a science and there's so much to learn about but I have a buddy his name's Tamara Tim I'll leave a link to his twitch and his YouTube channel but he knows a lot more about cameras and color grading than I do so go check him out go and ask him questions these is really really helpful and use a lot more knowledgeable than I am but I'm just gonna do something really simple I'm just gonna play around with these dials so I'm gonna dial down the lift just a tiny bit so your lift is where your shadows lie so if you dial this down you're making your shadows darker so that's gonna give you more deeper blacks yeah so right about here seems about right and then I'm also gonna dial back my gamma so this is like where your mid-tones lie so your skin colors I like to dial this back a little bit but play around with it and see what it does for you and then I'm gonna boost my gains a little bit so your gains are like where your highlights are so like the highlights in my hair and on the side of my face what's the side of my face and you'll notice that as you're making changes you can actually click on this colorful wheel here and that's gonna disable all the changes that you're making so while you're making changes you can just click on this to toggle your changes on and off just so you can see how much of the big difference you're making so this is with it off and then just those simple changes my image looks a lot better and more punchy and then I'm just gonna like lift my offset just a tiny bit and maybe I might add a like a little bit more saturation just to make the color stand a bit more maybe just the touch more contrast and I'm gonna leave it there I think for now for a really simple colored grade I think this will work now once you're happy with that you want to go into your project settings by clicking on the wheel in the bottom right go into your master settings then under timeline resolution change it to 512 by 512 it's really important if you don't do this you're gonna get some crazy weird colors if you put this into OBS so make sure you do this 512 by 512 is just the size of that original op PNG file we're gonna save this and then you'll see the timeline changes size and we're gonna click on the original a PNG file in the timeline here and it's just going to look like this weird grid this is our what our LUT looks like and it's the original LUT untouched in OBS and real simple all we're gonna do is we're gonna middle click on our clip that we got from OBS and you'll see that the colors change so once the colors change you know that you've done it right once you've done that then you right-click on it and click grab still after doing that you want to click right here this is the still that you just created you're gonna right-click it this is our LUT completely done we're just gonna export it now so export it and then go to where your Luntz are saved and click on PNG because we're gonna save it as a PNG file and just name it whatever you want I'm just gonna name mine Panasonic g7 cuz that's the camera that I'm using right now and save it and that's it then after you've done that pretty much go to OBS you right click on whatever your camera is and go to filters and then go to apply filter and or apply LUT click on that and then browse for that PNG file that you just created I'm just gonna add that and then you'll see if you toggle the filter on and off you can see the colors change and I think this one looks a lot more punchy I like the way this one looks can you go back to your camera we're gonna do some before and after so this is before applying the LUT I'm gonna apply it and then this is after lunch so you can just see how much of a big difference these colors have made and I've creamer I just quickly made up a lot for our webcam so let's switch to the webcam now our webcam is looking really flat and I just quickly made a lot I'm gonna apply it right now and you can just see for the webcam it's made I get dramatic difference our colors look a lot more natural a lot more punchy just a lot I think it looks much better and that's color grading in a nutshell now I did skip over a lot of those details pretty fast cuz I didn't want this video to be too long but again go out do your own research and how to do color gradient DaVinci Resolve and you can get a much much better quality than even I just did this just something like 30 seconds that's the entire video I know that's a long ones probably like a 20 minute video by now but just by using some lights manual settings on our camera and some simple color grading we've made our camera look at thousand times better I'm gonna overlay some before and after footage both of the mirrorless camera and the webcam just so you can get an idea of how far we've come but if you guys have any questions about things I didn't cover in the video or things I just flat-out didn't explain well let me know by leaving a comment down below and if you guys have any more questions about streaming you can jump into my twitch stream I stream four nights a week you guys can also join the discord I just did a massive overhaul of the discord so there's some new channels in there if you guys want to ask for some help or if you want to maybe you want to share how your camera looks like now that you've done this video other than that I've wasted far too much of your time so get out there create some amazing content I'll see you guys hopefully in about a week or so with a new video and you guys have yourselves a great week peace [Music] [Music]

Channel: nutty

Views: 380,463

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Id: tTj-uvVrOYM

Length: 18min 11sec (1091 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 12 2020