Zoom’s ‘Virtual Backgrounds’ let you customize your background.
Virtual Backgrounds can be any image or video you’d like.
This article provides a step-by-step guide on how to change Zoom backgrounds.
Full Video How-To: Click the play button and watch a complete how-to demonstration about how to change Zoom background.
First Step: Gather Images
Start with an image or video that you’d like to use for your virtual background on Zoom.
Make a folder called ‘Zoom Background Images’ and ensure that your video-clip an/or image files are all contained within it.
We’ll be using a set of six Christmas Zoom Backgrounds created using a Poe Ai image generator called Recraft V3.
You can download the same background files too; simply click that ‘Christmas Zoom Backgrounds’ link above, and you’ll be able to follow-along with the steps in this how-to.
Standard Zoom Backgrounds: San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, Blades of Grass, Milky Way’s planet Earth, and several more.
Second Step: Zoom Settings
Open your Zoom Workspace app and go into your ‘Settings’.
In your Zoom ‘Settings’, scroll to ‘Background & Effects’.
Within ‘Backgrounds & Effects’, select ‘Virtual Backgrounds’.
On the ‘Virtual Backgrounds’ section, click the plus-sign button [+] to “Add Image or Video”
Navigate to the ‘Zoom Background Images’ folder on your hard-drive and click your image or video file.
Third Step: Testing in Zoom
Once you’ve added your image or video to your Zoom ‘Virtual Backgrounds’ you can select your new background from the visible thumbnails below.
Clicking your thumbnail image should cause the background to instantly change behind you.
You can click the different virtual background images to see how they look.
To increase the realism of the virtual-background effect, adjust a nearby room light to match your virtual background’s lighting:
Point a light in a different direction, or try dimming your light source, or changing it’s color temperature.
If the perspective of your virtual background image seems ‘off’, try tilting your camera up /down a bit, or panning it left / right.
Next Step: Make Your Own
You can make your own Virtual Backgrounds for Zoom in just a few seconds using Poe Ai’s image-generator tools.
To create our example Christmas Zoom backgrounds I utilized Poe Ai, which contains a text-to-image ai called Recraft V3.
Check out more related Ai articles here, too, in case you’re curious about the current capability of these kinds of things.