Moving away from friends and family can be a frustrating adjustment at any age. We take for granted the availability of friends and family who live across town or short daytrips from our own homes. It’s not until you move away and realize that Sunday dinner with grandparents is no longer possible. With wide availability of broadband access from DSL and cable providers, coupled with free WiFi in dozens of locations in virtually every major city, finding alternate ways to connect with loved ones via the Internet is a viable alternative (even if it isn’t the same). Email and free VoIP phone calls are obvious and affordable methods of communication, but lack the personal touch of face-to-face interaction. Webcams are an obvious way to bridge the impersonal and often misinterpreted nature of text messaging, adding facial expressions, hand gesturing and body language to the slightly more dynamic voice conversations.

Webcam communication is imperfect when not optimized because friends and family back home often look the size of postage stamps without properly optimizing your computer before making the connection. Instead of looking at the other end of your communication in miniature, size up the conversation by performing a few simple tweaks on your PC designed to maximize onscreen viewing area without sacrificing quality. Follow the steps in my latest tutorial to improve your Webcam image quality for better conversations across any geographic distance.