Pro Level Embroidery Studio Lighting In A Box

Lighting your work for social media videos and snaps can get pretty confusing pretty quickly. Without fancy photography lighting your hand embroidery may look flat, shadowy, too dark or weirdly yellow depending on the light you have at hand. 

Enter the $20 solution to yo’problem!

 

A few of you have expressed an interest in learning about how to record and edit embroidery videos so I thought I’d share my favourite hassle free lighting setup.

(An extra photography hack for you too if you read to the end! 😉)

This is my little light box…

(Dog for scale)

And really it’s the perfect size unless you’re working on massive embroidery projects. These photography boxes are great for embroidery videos. (They’re also great for just embroidering in if you struggle with eye strain).

This little cube’o’light folds flat, is super lightweight and only set me back about £15.

Above is it’s case, it comes with several colored backdrops for photos too.

It has a usb cord and LED lights in the ceiling. The white walls bounce the light around thus removing dark shadows and giving you a nice even brightness.

I would recommend getting one with 2 strips of LEDs in the top, one back one front. 2 strips means twice the light. Any less would be too dark for me.

If your videos are still looking low quality you’ll have to get an extra light outside the box and point it at your embroidery.

(You’ll want your light and camera/cameraphone to your left if you’re right handed and vice versa).

It’s been home to almost all of my YouTube videos thus far.

I highly recommend one o’these to anyone wanting to make some vids for social media on the cheap.

So if you’ve wondered about ‘professional lighting’ for embroidery videos and reels, now you know you can get a 16”/40cm cube of light for about 20 bucks. The perfect size for embroidering in.

Mine was from eBay, but there are a ton of sellers on both eBay and Amazon selling more or less the same light box. Just search photography light box LED or something similar and they all come up.

 

I made a little wedge from an old Amazon box so I could angle my embroidery toward the camera without needing a stand. I stuck some white printer paper on it for a cheap as chips plain background.

But you can find way better backgrounds free by grabbing some of those wallpaper testers you can rip off and take home in B&Q or just splash out on some fancy wrapping paper for a couple bucks 😉

 

Any questions about embroidery videoing or my setup just hit me up at stitchgothica[at]gmail.com and ask so I can cover the right stuff in future posts. 😊