How to look good on Zoom, Teams and Google Meet

If you've been searching how to look good on Zoom, you've spotted the gap between how you look in person and how you look in that little square. Most of it is fixable in a few minutes, and the same fixes work whether you're on Zoom, Microsoft Teams or Google Meet — the camera doesn't care which app it's plugged into. Light is light, and a wide lens is a wide lens.

So before you go hunting for a setting to switch on, sort out the physical stuff. It's the part nearly everyone skips, and the part that does the most work.

Light is the whole game

If you change one thing, change your lighting. A webcam needs far more light than your eyes do for a clean image, and when it doesn't get enough it cranks up the gain — which is where all that grain, blotchiness and grey skin comes from.

The rule is simple: face a soft light source. A window during the day is the best free light you'll ever get — just sit so it's in front of you, not behind. That's the most common mistake people make: a window or bright wall at their back, the camera exposes for the bright bit, and you end up a dark silhouette. Backlight is the enemy.

Overhead light is the other trap. The ceiling spot above you drops hard shadows under your eyes and nose and makes everyone look exhausted. If that's all you've got, put a lamp on the desk in front of you to lift those shadows out — softer and from the front beats brighter and from above every time.

One refinement once your light is in front of you: nudge it slightly off to one side, around 45 degrees, rather than dead-on. Straight-on light is flat and can wash you out; a little to the side gives your face some gentle shape and depth without dropping hard shadows.

Camera height and distance

Next, where the camera sits — this is what's quietly distorting your face. Two things matter: height and distance.

Get the lens to eye level. A laptop on the desk points its camera up your nose: a low, unflattering angle, a clear view of your nostrils and, often, a double chin that isn't really there. Raise the laptop on a stack of books until the camera sits level with your eyes, or a touch above. The difference is startling, and it costs nothing.

Then sit back a bit. Webcam lenses are wide-angle, and leaning in close distorts you — whatever's nearest the lens looks bigger, so your nose balloons and your forehead stretches. Pull back to roughly arm's length and your proportions snap back to normal. On a laptop, push it away and lean back rather than hunching towards the screen.

Framing and what's behind you

With the light and lens sorted, framing is easy. Aim for your eyes about a third of the way down the frame, a little headroom above, shoulders visible at the bottom — not floating in the middle of a vast room, not so close your forehead's cropped off.

Backgrounds matter less than people think; the trick is just to keep them calm. A plain wall, a shelf, a plant — anything that isn't a cluttered mess fighting for attention. Skip the fake virtual backgrounds where you can, since the edge-detection chews on your hair and ears. If you need to hide a messy room, a gentle blur looks far more natural than a beach that isn't there.

What you wear, and what they hear

Two quick ones the camera rewards. For clothing, reach for solid blocks of colour over fine, busy patterns — thin stripes and tight prints shimmer and buzz on a webcam, and a mid-tone that is not the same colour as your wall stops you blending into the background. A defined shoulder — a structured top or jacket — reads as sharper than something loose and shapeless.

And though it is not strictly about looks: a pair of headphones does more for how professional you come across than almost anything else, because it kills the echo and boxy room sound that makes a call feel cheap. People forgive a so-so picture; they rarely forgive bad audio.

The built-in touch-ups, and where they stop

Once the room's right, you might still want a little help with your face — and the apps know it. Trouble is, they don't all offer the same thing, and what they offer is mild.

Zoom has the best-known option: Touch Up My Appearance, in Settings → Video. It's a single skin-smoothing slider — turn it up and it softens your skin texture a touch, and that's the whole feature. Fine for taking the edge off, but it only smooths, and only inside Zoom. We've written more about why Touch Up My Appearance isn't enough if you want the detail.

Teams and Google Meet give you even less. Teams has soft-focus and lighting tweaks that come and go between versions; Meet leans on background effects and low-light fixes rather than anything aimed at your face. None of them does much, and here's the catch that matters:

• They're mild. A bit of skin smoothing and nothing else — no help with tired eyes, uneven tone or the years the camera tends to add.
• They're per-app. Set up Zoom and you've done nothing for your Teams standup or your Meet call. Every app is its own island.
• They don't follow you around. Switch apps and you start from scratch. There's no single place to set "this is how I'd like to look" once.

This is the gap people fell into when the old desktop tools went away — Snap Camera, which piped a filter into Zoom, was discontinued in January 2023, and nothing in the calling apps really replaced it. So you're left toggling weak sliders in three separate settings menus.

One setting for every app

This is where FaceReady comes in, and it's the bit that fixes the face properly. It's a virtual camera: it sits between your webcam and whatever app you're in, cleans up each frame, and shows up as a camera you can pick in Zoom, Teams, Meet, Slack, Discord or FaceTime. Set it once and it's there in all of them.

What it does is gentle, live de-aging — the part the built-in tools don't touch. It evens out your skin, brightens tired eyes, softens jowls, takes a few years off. It de-ages; it doesn't change your face. You still look unmistakably like you, just like you on a good morning. Smaller is better here: dial it up and it reads as a filter, keep it subtle and people just think you look well rested.

And because it all happens on-device, on your own machine, nothing leaves your computer — no cloud, no account, no footage stored anywhere. It runs on Mac and Windows.

So: sort your light, raise the camera to eye level, sit back, frame yourself sensibly. That's most of looking good on camera, on any app, for free — and if you want your face at its best across all of them at once, that's the one thing FaceReady is built to do.