[alwaysanon]

100%. My new boss both has a background that is 'our office open plan area but empty' (he must have taken a photo when the place actually was empty) when he's at home. Plus he now has some greyscale or sepia filter so that he looks like a ye olde ghost for some reason. Not to mention he has headphones where you see these slivers of no background through them around his head.

I asked him if he was using some sort of filter and he was like "I don't like the color of my face in my camera". He stands out like a sore thumb in the grid of people in video in larger meetings now too as the only one not in color and with a weird background (others just blur it which I also kind of hate - but less).

I find calls with him with the video so distracting. I would much rather see his living room or whatever he's trying to hide - and it being real - than this weird fake office thing he is trying to do instead...

Maybe it is a sign of privilege though that I have a spare bedroom with a white wall behind me I can use without background or blur. I remind myself not everybody is so lucky...

[onion2k]

I asked him if he was using some sort of filter and he was like "I don't like the color of my face in my camera."

If he was to use OBS with the virtual camera as a middleware between him and the call he could apply a LUT (lookup table) filter to the camera output to correct the color[1]. I do this when I'm presenting to a lot of people or when a call is going to be recorded. It makes a heck of a difference to the quality.

[1] An explainer https://streamshark.io/obs-guide/color-grading-lut.

[logifail]

> My new boss both has a background that is 'our office open plan area but empty' [...]

During the first lockdown, a friend of mine sourced a photo of the inside of his local (closed-down) pub, and he used that as a background.

"Working from home? Of course I am. Honest..."

[Telemakhos]

I've done that. In my office I have a 27" Mac from 2011. I keep it around as a 32-bit machine, and I decided one day to try using it as a video conferencing computer, because it has the biggest screen out of everything I have. The camera, on its default settings, makes me look like I have a skin disease. It's really horrible. But Macs from that era could have their video stream intercepted and tweaked by third party systems, so I desaturated it to black-and-white.

[tomcam]

The first paragraph of your comment is so Dilbert I laugh out loud every time I read it

[Kaze404]

I don't understand what people are so eager to hide in their cameras

[vinayakpandey]

Unsightly and messy background.

[copperx]

In my case, location. It's nice to be able to join a Zoom meeting from a Starbucks or a restaurant.

[Angostura]

Usually my socks hanging up on the drier behind me.

[Your_Boss]

We’re gonna talk about this on Monday, [name redacted].