The background

With nothing selected, open the Background tab.

What is on offer

Twelve wallpapers, each with a name: Aurora, Dusk, Ocean, Peach, Lime, Mint, Berry, Ember, Slate, Sand, Midnight and Rose. They are drawn rather than photographed, which means they are sharp at any canvas size and they weigh nothing.

Twelve gradients, if you want something simpler than a wallpaper.

A flat colour, picked with the colour picker.

Your own picture. Click to choose a file, or copy an image anywhere in Windows and press Paste. Ctrl+V works here too.

Background blur softens whatever is behind the recording, which is what makes a busy photograph usable as a background instead of a distraction.

Choosing one

Light backgrounds read as friendly and product-like. Dark ones read as technical. Both are fine; what is not fine is a background with more contrast than the thing you are demonstrating, because the eye goes to the loudest thing on screen.

If you have a brand colour, the flat colour option with the exact hex value is the least noisy choice you can make.

No background at all

Full frame at the top of the tab puts the recording back to filling the whole canvas with nothing around it. One button, and it undoes the padding, the corners, the inset and the shadow in one go.

That is the right answer more often than people expect. A software demonstration where the detail matters wants every pixel it can get.

The live backdrop

For vertical video there is a different option again: the background made out of the recording itself, blurred and dimmed to fill the space at the top and bottom. See Vertical video.