Meet the video effects

If you have a Mac with a M-series chip, you have access to vide effects when you use a webcam. There are two effects that are especially useful:

• Portrait mode: blurs slightly the background

• Studio light: fixes the colors and puts more light on your face.

Here's an image from the Apple documentation (focused on Facetime, but it works in other tools like Descrip too) that shows where you can find these buttons:

By using these two effects, even if I have some tiny lights (two elgato Air lights) and an okay webcam (Elgato Facecam, version 1) it really improves the image without looking too processed.

Sure it's not yet DSLR level. But when I compared it to a cheaper DSLR like the Canon M50, it does the work.

So under a budget of 2k-4k for a camera + lense, it feels to me that a good webcam is just better.

How it looks with the effects

How it looks with both effects:

How it looks without the studio light effect: