Randall F. Dean shows how to blur your background in Microsoft Teams, use built-in backgrounds, and upload custom ones. He covers when to enable effects before a meeting starts, what to wear so you don't disappear into the background, and why you might see weird halo artifacts around your head.
Chapters
All right. Hi everybody. This is Randy Dean, the Email Sanity Expert. And today I want to make a quick tip video about Microsoft Teams and how you can utilize blur and background. So let's jump into my Microsoft Teams. I'm going to actually open up my session. Hi everybody. Uh, and I want to sort of show you some interesting things. Um, I'm in the doorway to joining a new meeting. As you can see, I could join now right here, but there's two different ways that you can change your backgrounds. One is when you're at the doorway to enter a new Teams meeting, you can come right here into background filters. And so I'm going to go into background filters and notice that right now I'm in my kitchen. This is one of the reasons that you might want to consider utilizing some of these filters, because take a look at this right here. They have this really cool function called blur. And if I turn on blur, now you don't see my kitchen cabinets or cupboards or what's happening behind me. So that's sort of nice. Now, if I take this one step further, notice that they have a whole series of preloaded, basically, background images that you can use. And you can click on any one of these, come down to the bottom, and hit Accept, and it will become— Apply, and it will become your background thing. And then you can hit Join Now. And notice that now I had the background filter in the background. And let's join in, and you'll see— when I join into the meeting. Uh, I'm not going to invite anybody to join this, but now I'm in this faux living room setting with a window looking at the building outside, which isn't even really here. Now what's interesting is you can also change your background settings from the inside of an active current meeting. You come up here and go to the three dots, the ellipses. Under More Actions, you can come down to Apply background effects. So if you're in a meeting, you can also make this change. Hit Apply background effects. And once again, if I want, I could come up here, hit Blur and Apply. Now I'm blurred again. Or what's interesting is, take a look at this, I've actually loaded in— I mean, they have all these different views, you know. Let's say you're doing an online birthday party, you could hit Apply.
That's sort of fun.
Um, but you can also come down here and take a look at this. Um, I actually loaded in a couple of my own photos. Now, this is really interesting. If I come down here, this is actually my deck on the back of my house. Hey, it's a beautiful summer day even though it's early February. Aren't the flowers pretty this time of year? Um, but the other thing that you can do, which is really interesting, is you can even add in your own background if you'd like.
It's real simple.
You just come up here and hit Add New, and when you hit Add New, it's going to take you in to where you have your pictures. And I'm going to go to my OneDrive picture cabinet and I'm going to page down. I preloaded this picture so that I could use it. Home Office Bookshelf Edit. Now I'm going to hit Open, and what's going to happen is it's going to now be added to the bottom of my list. I can click on this, hit Apply, and now I'm in front of my bookshelf. Now one of the interesting things— notice I got a little bit of a halo thing going on, and if I put my hands up here, whoa, that's interesting. It looks like I'm able to, you know, get my aura, so to speak. Um, just realize that you're going to get these little halos and things like that when you utilize these tools. And, um, one of the things that I would also give as a final tip is make sure you wear something that has a lot of contrast with whatever your background is. Now see, if you remember, the, the base background is white, and I'm going to come back down here and show you what I mean again.
I'm going to just click No Background, hit Apply. There's my kitchen cabinets again. And see, because I have this contrast, it's allowing these backgrounds to all work really well. So just think about that. If you're going to use a background, it's going to probably work best if you have a solid contrast that is a different color and different darkness from whatever background is naturally behind you. That'll make it work better. All right, so with that, um, what I'm going to do right here is I'm actually going to leave this, uh, meeting. And close my Teams. I'm going to come back to my video here in my Zoom, do a Shift+F5, and what I'm going to do here, which is sort of fun, is you're probably wondering what's next. I'm actually going to start my video now in Zoom. Hi everybody again. And as you can see, what I was doing here, which is sort of fun, is I was actually using Zoom as my overlay to make the video about Teams so I could show you the Teams features without having to be in the Teams meeting. GoToMeeting. And what's funny is when I make my Zoom videos, I'm probably using Teams or GoToMeeting to build those videos, doing it the exact opposite. So a little trick for you if you're building any kind of little tutorial videos. This is something new. I want to try to build a whole series of little Microsoft Teams videos. And the reason I'm doing this is a whole bunch of my clients have asked, you know, for a program specifically on utilizing Microsoft Teams. So I'm building that program right now, and what I'm going to do as I go through this process is build a whole series of little tutorial videos. And so I'm going to try to focus on just one or two little things, like this one was background and blur and how to install your own background and how to turn on the backgrounds and blur from either before you go in the meeting or after the meeting. And I'm going to try to do more videos like this, but I'm going to try to keep them that simple because I'm going to add these to my e-learning course on meetings and virtual meetings. That's on my e-learning channel in the comments below if you're watching this on YouTube, as well as taking all these videos and making a new YouTube playlist specifically for Microsoft Teams. And I'll probably do the same thing for the videos I've made for Zoom also. So watch for that. That's something new that I'm adding right now. And keep me in mind for your upcoming events and programs. And, you know, in the next month or so, I'll probably have a fully functional Microsoft Teams course that you could offer. Here I am in the background of me, but hey, let's put me right here. And yeah, I'd like to thank you for your time. You'd like to learn more about me and what I do. My name is Randy Dean, the email sanity expert guy. Uh, my website, randalldean.com. If you like these videos, please, uh, like the video and hit subscribe. And if you'd like to get a whole series of little tip sheets on time management, email management, Outlook usage, Google usage, Gmail usage, smartphone, tablet usage, and probably new content on Teams and Zooms and GoToMeeting, Um, send me an email randy@randalldean.com and just put YouTube PDF in the subject line, and I will send you a whole deck of little bonus PDF tip sheets, many of which link right through to some of my videos here on YouTube. Thanks for your time.
