Adobe Photoshop for Beginners : Create Professional YouTube Thumbnails

1. Intro: Hey everyone and welcome to this class which is going to teach you everything that you need to know to make awesome YouTube thumbnails with Adobe Photoshop. Now I have been creating content on YouTube for more than three years, and I have learned that in that time that your thumbnail is actually the most important part of your video. Because when you think about it, if you don't have a great thumbnail that entices people to watch your video. It doesn't matter how good your video is. Never actually going to be seen if the thumbnail navigates click. So why not go ahead and join me as I take you through all of the essential techniques in Adobe Photoshop that all of the top YouTube is used today to create their thumbnails. So that's enough from me and hopefully I'll see you inside the class. 2. Class Project: Okay, so welcome and thank you for enrolling into this class. What I'm going to be doing is taking you through every single aspect that you need to know to create an amazing thumbnail that stands out on YouTube. Just an example of some of the things you expect to see in this class. I'll be covering things like cutting out your image, adding shadows and strokes to make your text stand out. And even how to whiten your teeth to make yourself look the best you can for that YouTube home screen where your videos are going to be seen. Now when it comes to the class project, I would love it if after you've finished watching the class, you posted a thumbnail that you've created using some of the techniques demoed in this class. And I'll be looking out to give any feedback on as many as I possibly can. But having said that, that's enough for me, this now get into the modules. 3. Creating A Project: In this module, I'm gonna be showing you how you can set your photoshop project out to make sure that it's the correct size for a YouTube thumbnail. And it's actually really easy to do if you go ahead and load up Adobe Photoshop, this is what you're going to be presented wherever you can. Have your home screen with a few of your in previous projects on there. And basically all we're going to want to do is go ahead and click Create New on the left-hand side. So I'm going to go ahead and do that. And basically what you're going to be presented with is this new document screen. And basically all we're going to want to do to make sure that we have the right size. I've already actually got it here, but what we're gonna do is head over to the right-hand side. And we're going to make sure that our width of our project is going to be one to a 0 pixels, so 1280 pixels. And then we're going to want our height to be 720 pixels. Now, this is the perfect size and the recommended size for a YouTube thumbnail. If you were to do it any bigger, YouTube will either not accept that. I don't even know what will happen if they do your thumbnail is gonna be too big for the actual placeholder on YouTube anyway, and it's going to look rubbish. So the main thing we want to make sure is that we have our width of our project as 1280 and the height of our project is 720 pixels. Now, with the other stuff, I would probably just leave that. I've always left it, I've never touched it. And what we're going to simply do from there is go ahead and click Create. So if I go ahead and do that, and then from there what you're going to see is your new document where we can actually start creating our thumbnail. 4. Tour of Photoshop Interface: In this module, what I'm going to be doing is giving you a quick tour of the essential things that you need to know about the Adobe Photoshop interface. Now, I'm not going to go too deep into some of the tools. I'm just going to show you what you need to know to start creating YouTube thumbnails. And this start off with this big white screen in the middle of our screen, and that is our document window. So everything that you see on here is going to be our thumbnail. We can zoom out of it to make it a little bit smaller. So if we were designing for mobile, we can see how it would look on a mobile screen. We could zoom in to make sure we got the full size. But basically this is our canvas of work where we're going to be putting all of our images and texts. And this is what is going to be printed out when we actually decided explore our thumbnail. Now down the left-hand side, what we have is our list of tools which we're going to be using to create our thumbnails. Now, I'm not going to go through all of them right now because I'm gonna have each module separated for each one of these tools. But basically these are gonna be all the different tools that we're going to be using. Next up, down the bottom right-hand corner of the screen right here we have our layers section now, ladies is basically what makes Photoshop so good. So basically let's say I imported some texts into Photoshop that's going to be counted as a layer. Let's say I then put an image on Photoshop, that's going to be another layer. And if I wanted that text to be on top of the image, we're going to organize it in layers. So one text is above the image, so on and so forth. And this is a really powerful part of Photoshop, which we are going to be getting into in the next module. Now moving up to the top right-hand corner, we have our color picker now we can do color swatches, gradients, and patterns. We're going to stick with colors for now. But basically let's say we wanted to change the color or something, or we need to do is highlight that layer and then we can come over here and pick the color. But like I said, we're gonna have a module on that as well. In the middle of the right-hand side we have our properties adjustments and library section. Now the only two that I really use is the properties and adjustments in the properties section, this is where we can obviously change the size of something. So let's say we imported an image, we wanted to make it a little bit smaller. We could go ahead and do that manually in there, but I'm going to show you an easier way on how to do that. Next up we have the adjustments section where we can simply just do things like adjusting the brightness here, the contrasts we can do the saturation, we can do the color balance of our images as well. So many different adjustments that we can make. We're gonna be going through a couple of these throughout the class. And then finally on the right-hand side, this is the library section. So this is where you can essentially import images just so you can speed up your workflow a little bit, but we're not going to be focusing on that in this class. We're gonna be focusing on the core basics. And then finally at the top here we have the Options bar. Now it's going to look exactly like this. If you're using Adobe Photoshop for Mac, if you're using it for Windows, it may look a little bit different, but all of the features are going to be there, but that is essentially just a quick overview tour of the Adobe interface. Now if you're still looking at this and thinking, it's very overwhelming. Yes, it probably is when you're first starting. But the great thing is, we don't actually need half of this duct create amazing YouTube thumbnails. And I will make sure that I will definitely cover every single piece of information that you need to know about this software throughout this class. And by the end, you will have a really good idea on how to navigate this piece of amazing software. So this gets into that. 5. Understanding Layers: All right, so in this module I'm going to be going through layers, which is basically the main component of Photoshop, which makes it so powerful. And if you can use layers correctly, you can really make your thumbnail stand out. And this is going to get you many more clicks on YouTube. And what I have here is a thumbnail that I made earlier for my own channel. And what we're gonna be doing is going through it and dissecting and just using some examples on how layers actually work with this one. Now, on the right-hand side here, as you can see, I have a list of all the different layers that make up this thumbnail. And the way that the layering system in Photoshop works is actually really simple. Now, basically the way that it works is the higher the element is up in this layer list, the more priority or the more towards the front of your document that image or piece of text is going to be. So as you can see, the one at the top here we've labeled picture of me and as you can see, that's a picture of me. And this is the most forward layer in my entire document. Now, the first thing that we could do, we can completely get rid of this layer temporarily. But going ahead and clicking on this AI tool over here, if I was to click on it, as you can see, it's going to remove this image. So I can maybe work on a layer underneath, but we don't want to do that. We want to bring that back. Now, let's say we wanted to bring this image down the left-hand side here above a picture of me. Because right now as you can see here by drag that It's going to be behind me because it's a layer below my face. If we wanted to bring that on top of my face and we wanted me to be behind that image. All we need to do is locate the image and our layer section, which it's done right here. We simply drag this image right here all the way to the top of our layers. And what you'll be able to notice as soon as I let go, it's going to place that image above the image of me. As you can see, it's gone ahead and done that. And that is simply how layering works in Photoshop is very, very simple. So let's go ahead and put that to the back of me again, right here. And we're gonna move that back into place. Now let's say we've got these flames here and we wanted to bring these flames in front of the image of where it says return minus 3 thousand pounds. What I actually have is multiple flames here. So what we can actually do is go ahead and remove this one temporarily by clicking on the eye tool. And then we can see which flame we want to bring over the top. So there's select this one right here. Then what I'm going to do is drag this flame over on top of my image in the layering system. And then we're going to activate the image again. And once again you can see that we've got our flame over top of our image that we were looking at in the first place. And we can do that, but that's just basically a really simple explanation on how layering works. And just to finish this module off, what I'm actually going to do is just minimize all of these layers. So I'm going to get rid of them on the screen. And then I'm gonna go through each one of these individually so you can see how there's fun nail was constructed. Okay, cool. So we have our blank canvas now. So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to add our base background, as you can see down here. So this add that layer. From there, we have our main background which I've added. Cool, So we've got that from there. We're going to add our flames, which we've added, we've got more flames to make it look a little bit more realistic. We've got even more flames. We've got even more flamed on the right-hand side there. We've got more flat him. So that's our flame section. Next up we're going to add our image on the left hand side. So we're gonna go ahead and enable that. From there we're going to add our texts. So we've got our now and then we've got our this n, So you can see that being added. And then finally we've got the image of me. We're just going to sit nicely over there. And if we wanted to, we can just adjust any of these sections as we please, but that is essentially layers and how layers work. Super important part of Photoshop, I really suggest with your own project just doing a few simple bits of texts and images, bringing them to the front and back just so you can understand the concept. 6. Quick Selection Tool: In this module, I'm gonna be showing you how to use the Quick Selection tool to be able to cut yourself out of an image. Now, this is one of the most commonly used tools in Photoshop because most of the thumbnails, but you'll see from the best creators aren't just gonna be pictures of them with a background. Normally they've cut themselves out and they put them on top of another background and things like that. Or you can also use this tool to cut an object out from something. So if you've seen an image with something that you really like inside and you just want that element. You can cut that out using this tool as well. Now, as you can see, I've got this picture of me with a plain background now I've shot this against my wall now that's a really good tip by the way, if you do want to get a good image of yourself, that you just want to cut out and put on a different background. Take your pictures or your thumbnail pages against a clear wall. This gives Photoshop a much better chance of getting a really nice crop of your image out. So that's just a quick top tip. But basically with the Quick Selection Tool, all you're going to want to do is come over to the left-hand side in the toolbar and hover over this button right here. And what will come up is the Quick Selection Tool. So what we're going to do is click on that. And then simply from there, we can actually just start left clicking on our image. And what it will actually uses photoshops like recognition software and actually start working out where we actually want to have our borders. So if I just click the left button right here and just drag that down my face. As you can see, the small little kind of answers I like to call them is actually working out automatically where the edge of my face actually is. Now I've got my finger down on the left button the whole time on the mouse. If I was to go over to my ears, it should just work out the edge of my ears as you can see. Now what I'm basically doing here is constructing an outline of my image. So if I just go all the way down to the bottom here and then just drag all that over there. Now just double-check that. Cool. What you can see here is my image is now surrounded by, like I said, these crawling ants. And this is essentially what we're going to cut away from this background now, to be able to do that, what we need to do is go up to the top here and we're going to want to click on the Select and Mask button. So if I go ahead and do that, and essentially what that is actually done now is given as a preview of what it's actually going to crop out. And what I've actually done is used the red background just so I can see things a little bit clearer. But if he were to go and click on the, say the marching ants, you can see the marching ants right there. I didn't actually know they called it marching ants. You can see it against a black background. You've got the white background here as well. You've got black and white, which I don't really see why anyone would do. You've got it on the layers as well, which we're not going to do. But I really liked using it with the red background because it's a really nice contrast. So what we can essentially do from here is just double-check our image just to make sure that we fully crop things out. Now, if you haven't, it's not to worry. What you can simply do is come over to the left-hand side and click on this brush tool. And what you can essentially do if you just click left-click, you can actually just cut more of your image out. So let's just get rid of that a little bit now and I'll just give you a better example. Say maybe, as you can see at the top here, there's actually a little bit of white in my hairline this say if I wanted to remove that, what I could actually do is hold down the Option button which will give us the minus. So taking things away, if asked to hold my left mouse click down and just hover over there, what I'm essentially doing, as you can see now the reds over there is I have now taken that off the mask. So what we can do is go ahead and get rid of this rubbish that I just done right now. Cool. So we're almost at a state where we're ready to actually mask this image and take it away from its background. Now, there's a couple of other things that you can actually do to make this look even better. The first thing we can do is actually shift our edge of our image in a little bit tighter. So they say there is a little bit of white showing on the outline of my image, which there actually is, as you can see, it's very, very small. What we can actually do is shift the edge in if we go minus. And what you can see is happening here is if we were to expand it, you can see the edge of the images getting whiter. If we were to get a minus here, we're really getting a nice tight cut on our image, so it's going to look a lot better. And then one thing we can do as well if I just zoom out, just to make that look a little bit more natural is just up the smoothness of our image just so it doesn't look like I've actually just cut it out. So if we just take a look, it's very subtle the difference, but basically, all this does is just smooths the harsh edges of my image now with fever and contrast, I don't really bother with those two, but this one here you just need to play with and just till you get this preview screen looking exactly how you want your image to look. Now, once we've done that and we're all ready to go, all we have to do is go ahead and click Okay. And essentially what that's going to do is bring you back to your main screen. However, we're not done there yet because all we have right now is just simply our mainstream of our marching ants. Again, what we now need to do is right-click on our image. What we want to do is come down to Layer via Copy. And what that's essentially going to do is make a copy of our new cut out image as another layer. So I've also do Layer via Copy. What you can see down the right-hand side is our main picture. And then from there we have our newly cut out image as a separate layer. Now, if I was to simply go ahead on my selection tool on the top left here, I can click on layer one, which is our new layer. And I was to drag that away. As you can see, we've created a separate layer now just to be able to get rid of our original image, all we need to do is click, Delete or click on the Eye of our main image. And that's going to get rid of our main image and leave us with our cutout layer, which we can then put on any background we want. I'll just go and grab a background right now. Just a demo that okay, so this is just the first one that I found on Google, but as you can see, we've now got our separate layer on top of her individual background. We can see that our backgrounds and below our layer one. But if I was to maybe put on main one again, is going to bring that on top. If I was to get rid of our layer one is going to remove that and just have our original image. If I was to add the layer one and then remove the main, we've now got our image on front of a funky background, and that is essentially how the Quick Selection Tool works. 7. Adding Text: In this module, what I'm gonna be showing you how to do is add text to your image. And we're gonna be using the same demo image that we used in the last module. And adding text is super, super simple. All we need to do is go over to our toolbar on the left-hand side. And we need to scroll down to the point where we can see the T on our toolbar. And as you can see, it gives us our preview. This is our horizontal type tool. Now, all we need to do is go ahead and click that so we have it selected. Move our mouse cursor into the middle of our documents screen and just click anywhere with our left-click. And that's going to bring as our text up from there, what we can do is go ahead and click on this tick in the top corner just to confirm that we want to add that to our document. What you can see is inner layer tool right at the top, we've got our new text layer. As you can see, it's defined by the T and then we've got exactly what our text says, Loren Ipsum, which is just some demo texts. What we can then do is go ahead and click the Move tool and just move that into the middle of the screen, just so we can see exactly what we're working with. Now if we want to be able to change this text, all you need to do is double left-click on the text, and as you can see, it's now highlighted it. We can then click Delete and then we can put whatever we want into this text. So I'm just going to put example for now and I'm gonna move it to the left-hand side. So just clicking on that text and moving it. Remember, if you want to move the texts, you need to select the move tool. Don't try and move it with the text tool, because if you go ahead and do that, it's just going to add more texts at a document as you can see right there. So let's go ahead and delete that. Okay, cool. So now we've got our texts. Of course, one thing that we might want to do is change the size of it and change the font style as well. These are really simple and basic things that we're probably going to want to do now to be able to resize the text is super simple. All you do is actually click on the text and you can see these dots in the corners. And all you need to do is hover over them, left-click and as you can see, you can drag them in and out and it will make the text bigger. Now, another way that you can actually do this is by double-clicking on the text and you can see the text size here. So we've, we're to change that to 40. That'll make it a little bit bigger. If we'd go ahead and change it to 20 is going to make it a little bit smaller. So that's how you change the size of the text. Now the next thing that you're going to want to be able to do with the Texas, of course, change its color. And once again, this is super simple. All you need to do is double-click on the text once again, what you're going to be able to see up the top here is this color picker. So if we were to go ahead and click white because it's currently white at the moment, is going to bring the color picker up. Now, let's just go ahead and select a different color. Obviously, you can put custom colors in. You can go ahead and look at color libraries. But just for this demo, we're going to make something just in here. So let's go ahead and get a yellow and just pop that in there. Maybe that's a little bit too dark. Let's go with this one. So we click. Okay, as you can see, that was changing as I was doing it. Let's make that a little bit bigger. Essentially, what I've done is made the text yellow. I've changed the size of it. Now as you can see looking at this text right here, it doesn't really stand out to me with the background. It kind of looks like it's sinking into that background a little bit, which is why in the next module I'm going to show you how to add a stroke to make this text stand out a little bit better. 8. Stroke: In this module, I'm gonna be showing you how to add a stroke to your images and your text to make them stand out a little bit. So let's go ahead and add it to our image first. And basically to add a stroke, all you need to do is make sure that you have your layer selected and you need to go over to your layer on the right-hand side. And if you just simply double-click to the right of your layer, just so it's in the box right here. That will then bring up our layer styling options. Now, what you can see down the left-hand side, we've got loads of different options, but the one that we're going to one is the stroke options. So we can go ahead and do is go ahead and click that and nothing is actually selected right now. Let's just move that to the left-hand side a little bit so we can see our image. If we simply go ahead and activate the stroke, what you can see, it's going to add the basic stroke to our image. So if I were to go ahead and click that, what you can see, it's added a white outline of our image. Now you've probably seen this in loads of different YouTube thumbnails. I'm going to throw some demos up on the screen right now. And essentially adding a stroke to your images or your pieces of texts we'll do is just help them stand out a little bit better. So as you can see, we've got our white around me right now. What you can essentially do is go and change the positioning of the stroke. So at the moment it's saying it's on the inside of me. So if we were to go and click the outside, it kind of puts it on the outside there. I don't know why I've got this coming up there is because I masked my image a little bit bad, but I'll show you how to get rid of that in just a second. And then if we want to change the size of our stroke, we can just simply go ahead and change the size. So at the moment it's only five pixels. So if you wanted to make it bigger, we can go like that. I didn't think that looks really good, but normally I stick around five or six pixels when doing the outside of my image. So let's go ahead and stick with that. Of course, if we wanted to change the color, we can just go down to the color type. We can go ahead and select red if we want to. So we've got my outline in red, and that is essentially how you add a stroke to an image. Now, just before I get onto the text, I'll just show you how to remove these little strokes right here. Because basically what has happened is when I've masked the image, I haven't masked the outside of my image there. And basically it's putting a small stroke around some small particles now, be able to get rid of them. It's super, super simple. All we need to do is go over to this lasso tool right here. And then we want to go ahead and select the layer which these around. So for me I know that they're definitely on my image layer from when I masked out my, my image with the Quick Selection Tool. So I'm gonna go ahead and select that. And then all you do is click, Delete and wallah, they are completely removed from your document. So now we've done that. Let's go ahead and make this text stand out a little bit better with a stroke. So let's go ahead and click on Move tool once again. So we've got the, we've got the lasso tool out of the way. And then we're going to want to go ahead and click on one of our pieces of texts. So let's start off with example. Once again, just to the right of where I layer is, we're gonna want to double-click on it. And it's going to bring up our layers styling again, Let's move this box out of the way so we can see preview as we make our changes. And let's go ahead and click on Stroke. Then basically what you can notice here is that Photoshop is remembered our last stroke setting that we did on our image in its applied the same. However, I don't want it like that because I don't really like the way that the colors are clashing right now. I just want to make this piece of text just stick out a little bit better. So what I'm going to do is go ahead and select Color. And I'm just gonna go for black. And then what we're going to want to do on our layer styling is click Okay to confirm all this, I think it's pretty obvious to tell that this piece of text at the top here stands out way clearer than this piece of text at the bottom. And all I've done is added a simple stroke to this piece of text. Now, if I wanted to copy that onto this piece of text here, all I need to do is go ahead to our layer where we can actually see the stroke effect being added. If we go ahead and click Option and then click on Stroke and drag that onto text up the top here onto our layer. What you can see is it just copies that effect onto that text. And what we essentially have now is a stroke on both of our pieces of texts. And that of course, stands out way clearer than if I was just remove the stroke here and this one here than that. So that is how to add a stroke. A really powerful way to get things to stand out a little bit better. 9. Border: In this module, I'm gonna be showing you how to add a border to your thumbnail so they can start looking a little bit something like this. Now adding a border you can do in many different ways, but I'm going to show you the way that I do have my thumbnails, which I think is personally the easiest way to actually add a border. So let's get into that right now. And basically, all you need to do is you need to head to your background image. So it's going to likely be the bottom one in your layering order. So for me it's this really colorful background and you're going to want to make sure that it covers all of the different ends of the screen. So what I'm saying is if it's big like this, this isn't going to work. You're going to want to make sure that your background is just to the corners and make sure it perfectly fits your document. Now, if you have that, that's absolutely brilliant. You want to do now is go ahead on your background image and double-click it. So once again, that's going to bring up the Layer Style menu. And all we're going to want to do is just move that to a nice place, is go down and click Stroke. Now what you can see has happened here is nothing. And that's because if we go ahead and click on stroke, a stroke is currently on the outside of our image, which is gonna be outside of the document. So all we need to do is go ahead and click on inside. What essentially that has done is added our border. So if we wanted to make it a little bit thicker, we could go ahead and make it as thick as we want and don't want it that big, but we want to bring it in maybe to about, let's say 15 pixels. Let's just type that in. There we go. We have our border. Now I think that's really good. Of course, if we want to go ahead and change the color, we can actually go ahead and click on the Stroke option there and it will take us straight to it. We could go ahead and add a red border, which doesn't look very good because it blends in with the background. You could go with blue, but I'm going to actually stick with white because I think that looks pretty good. 10. Rectangle: In this module, I'm gonna be showing you how to use the rectangle tool. Now using things like rectangles, you can use them for all kinds of things. But what I really liked to use them for is if I've got some texts where there's no way I can get that text to stand out. I can just put it inside of a rectangle just to make it look a little bit clearer, offer an example of a thumbnail I've made in the past, just so you can see exactly how I've done this. And I'm gonna show you how to do this right now. Okay, So once again, we're going to want to come over to our toolbar. And what we're going to want to do is scroll all the way down and hover over this one right here, which is going to be our rectangle tool. To be able to add the rectangle into our document. We're going to want to go ahead and select that. Now one thing that you can actually do is right-click and you'll have some other options. Ellipsis tool, Triangle Tool, polygon tool line tool. But this one, we're just going to want to use the rectangle one. So this, go ahead and select that. Then what we're going to want to do is come over to our document and we're going to want to left-click and draw around our rectangle as so. Alright, cool. So what that's done is that it's drawn out of basic rectangle. One thing that you'll probably notice is that it's put it over the top of our texts, which is not good, but using the layering system, we can fix that in just a second. But first up, we're going to want to change the color and the border of our rectangle. So first up we can see that this color is currently green, which is what we don't want. We're going to want to make this text stand out a little bit. So we're going to want to do it as, let's say, a black background. So the first thing that we're going to want to do is head over to the appearance section on the right-hand side of the rectangle. And as you can see, we have our fill option, which is going to be our coloring option. And we're going to want to go ahead and click on that. And let's go ahead and just use this recently used black. And as you can see, it's changed the color to black. Now one thing that you did say is it did also have a border and we're gonna want to get rid of that. So we're going to want to take the stroke off that. So we're gonna go ahead and click stroke. And then we're going to want to click this button right here, which basically means don't really give it a stroke. So no color. Once we've done that, that's gotten rid of both of those and we now have our black rectangle, but is currently sitting over the texts at the moment. So having said that, what we're going to want to do is make sure that our black box is selected on the right-hand side. And the reason why it's sitting over to Texas because it's at the top of our layering system. And all we're going to want to do is drag this box underneath the text. And as you can see what our text is on top of our rectangle. Now, one thing that we're going to want to do is make this a little bit tighter because right now the rectangles a little bit too big for this text, as you can see, it's over the side a little bit big. It's okay from the top and the bottom, but on the sides it a little bit too big to be able to do that. We want to make sure that we have the rectangle selected. And then we're going to want to do command and T. And then once we've done that, all we essentially do is go from the right-hand side and we left-click and we drag it into where we want it to go. So that say here, as you can see, it's moved in. And then we can drag it in from the left-hand side as well and make sure it's the same as the right-hand side. And then boom, we have our black box with our text. 11. Blurring Background: In this module, I'm gonna be showing you how you can blur out your background. Now this is really important if you want to once again make an image stand out. Now, as you can see in this example, we have two layers, so we basically have my original image and then we have the layer that I've cut out, which is just a carbon copy of me pointing to absolutely nowhere on this screen. And basically what we're going to want to do is we're going to want to make sure that this background right here is completely blurred out so that the image of me really stands out to the viewer trying to look at this from now now to be able to do this, the first thing that we need to do is we need to make sure that we have the background selected. So we're going to go ahead and select that layer. And we can confirm that because that's the whole box instead of just the image of myself. So let's go ahead and select that. And then what we're going to want to do is we're going to want to go up to the top where the Options menu is this time. And we're going to want to click on the Filter button. So if we go ahead and click Filter, and then we can scroll down and we can go ahead and select Blur. Now there's actually quite a few options for blur, but the one that we're going to want to select is the most popular one, and that is the Guassian blur. I hope I said that correctly. But we're going to want to go ahead and select that. And what you can see instantly, it's just added a small blur and it's brought up this Guassian blur Options menu. And basically from there we can simply just control how much blur we want. So if I was to turn it all the way down, it would just completely get rid of the blur. And then if I was to turn up this site or maybe seven pixels, as you can see, my background has blurred out, but my image hasn't. And as you can see, if we just switch between the two, you can see how much it really does make my image pop out that little bit more when you actually blur out the background. So that's a really good example and that is exactly how you can blur out images and blur out of background of an image in Photoshop. 12. Drop Shadow: Now of course, in the last module I showed you how to blow out your background to make your thumbnail stand out a little bit more. In this one, I'm gonna show you how to add a drop shadow to your image so you can make it stand out even more than that. Now, drop shadows are really good if you're putting your image on a really bright background. So what I'll do is throw up a thumbnail which I recently created, which had a really bright background, which I didn't want to blur out. I just needed to make me stand out a little bit more in the front there. So I added a drop shadow just to separate myself from the background. And as you can probably see, it's worked quite nicely. So this actually show you how to do that. And the first thing that you're going to want to do is you're going to want to select the image where you want to add the drop shadow. So in this case it's going to be the image of myself. We're going to want to go over to our layer section on the right-hand side, we're going to want to make sure that I am selected. And we're going to want to double-click on that layer. That's then going to bring up the layer styling options. And as you can see down the left hand side, right at the bottom, we have our drop shadow option. So let's go ahead and click that. And what you can see, it's instantly added a drop shadow to our image. But if we want to go ahead and customize this drop shadow, we can go ahead and click on the drop shadow option. There's gonna be different options on what we can actually go with. First up, we have the opacity, which we can change the actual harshness of this drop shadow so evolves to make that a 100. Obviously you can see it's really, really dark, but it's moved all the way back down to where it was. You can also change the angle of the shadow. So right now we have it pretty centered, but if we wanted it to the left-hand side of us, we can move it to the left-hand side and everybody to actually change the distance right there. You can see it's moving it to the right and to the left or wherever we want to have it. In our case, we want to keep it nice and centered. So we'll just change the angle to the center and we'll have nothing on the distance. And then basically the main thing that you'll probably be controlling is the spread and the size. So if we up the spread right now we can see the shadow get a little bit bigger. It doesn't look too good, That doesn't know, it looks a bit more cartoony. So we want to drop that back down to how we have it. We really want to keep this nice and subtle because we want to make it look as natural as possible. And then finally, what we have here is obviously the size. So you can literally spread the size out as much as you want right now, That's all right. It's not great, but I like to keep it nice and tight to my subjects. So it really just helps it pop out from the background. So it's just up the spread a little bit, is up the opacity a little bit more too. So I stand up that little bit extra and I think that is just about good enough. So let's go ahead and click Okay, and what I can actually do down the right-hand side is flipped this shadow off and on. So we can really see the difference it makes in helping me stand out from the background. 13. Outer Glow: In this module, what I'm gonna be showing you is how to add an outer glow to your subject to make it stand out on a dark background. So what I did in the last module, we'll show you how to add a drop shadow. It might be the background was light in. You want your image to stand out. In this case, if we have a dark background and we want our image to stand out, what we can do is add an outer glow to the image. Now to do this, it's going to be very much similar to adding a drop shadow. And as you can see, we still have our drop shadow on here for my last module, what we're going to do is we're going to disable that right now by clicking on the eye tool. And then we're going to want to go ahead and click on our layer once again that we want to add our outer glow too. And then as you can see, just above the drop shadow, we have our outer glow option. So let's go ahead and select that. What you can see this time it's added an outer glow, it looks very much like a stroke, but the difference between this is, as you can see, it's got that little bit of a glow effect. It's not just a harsh line throughout the subject. It's just got that little bit of a glow, almost like a shadow. But it's not quite a shadow because you can't control how far away it's going to be from the body. It's nice and centered. And once again, we can customize how harsh and how big we want this outer closer. We can go ahead and click on Outer Glow. And once again, we've got the options of spread and size so we can make it a little bit bigger. We can make the spread out a little bit more. But essentially what you can see here is that if we had a dark background and we wanted our subject stick out from that, we can add a white outer glow to really help our image stick out from the background. One thing that you can do is actually click on the white box right now and you can change the color of this outer glow. So if I wanted it read, maybe I had a blue background and I wanted to read to stand out in my image, I could just simply add a red outer glow to it. And then once again, we can change the sizing and we can change the opacity of it as well. So we can just have it hovering like that. There's so many different options that you can use with this, but this is really good once again, for helping you get your image to stand out. Now, probably using a white one on this background is probably not that effective. And one thing you can even do with this as add a black outer glow to it. So it's very similar to adding a drop shadow, but you just don't have as much control over the subject as you do adding a shadow. So once again, I've added a black outer glow here. Let's just go and change that to blue or something like that so it matches almost the colors that I have in the background. And then let's just make this a little bit smaller, just to make that look a little bit more natural. Once again, just to show you the difference between the two, you've got the standard image and then you've got adding an outer glow to it as well, just gives it that little bit more character and just makes it stand out that little bit extra. 14. Spot Healing Brush: In this module, I'm gonna be showing you how to use the spot healing tool. Now this is basically used to remove anything you want off your face or within an image. So let's say you had a jump or that maybe had a mark on you want it to get rid of that in Photoshop. And basically, if you're going to want to use this, you're going to want to go over to the toolbar on the left-hand side and scroll down until you see this almost looks like an eraser style and this is gonna be the spot healing brush tool and educate say just for the demo there it's actually showing you exactly how it works. So we're going to want to go ahead and select that and we're gonna want to make sure that we have the spot healing brush tool selected. Now the next thing that we need to do is we need to select our layer that we want to perform this action on. So in my case, I'm going to want to remove some things from my face. So let's go ahead and select the layer one and let me just zoom in a little bit more. Cool and it's as easy as simply going over. So as you can see, I've got a slight mark on the top of my head there and just left clicking on that. And what it's going to do is almost pick up what is on your face or a sample of your face. And it's just going to simply replace it using its kind of AI Machine Learning. So as you can see, this is my skin tone right now, if I left-click on this mark here, as you can see, it's just completely removed it based on what Adobe thinks the image is gonna look like around it. So let's just do a couple more examples. Go with my little spot here. Boom, removed it. Let's just clean up a little bit more like that. That's fine. I could go ahead and remove this over here. Down here. This is just an example of me taking things off my face. You can literally take anything off anything else as well. So let's say move over to my hand as well. Let's move down here. You can see I've got a few things on my hand, so we just want to remove them. If you want to be a really quick and easy tool that you can use just to get rid of anything small on an image that you don't want to be presented. Like I said, it doesn't have to be used on your face. It can be used on literally anything. A good example that I had recently was I took a really good thumbnail photo, but I realized that I actually spent a bit of tomato sauce on my jumper and I really wanted to keep the photo. So what I did was I just removed the tomato sauce using the spot healing brush tool and everything was fine. Yeah, great tool. 15. Smart Objects: In this module, I'm gonna show you a really quick, powerful feature of Photoshop that it's going to save you so much time when you're actually creating things like texts and rectangles and trying to put them all on top of each other and things like that. Now, right now, as you can see, we have our individual texts layer and we have our individual rectangle layer. Now, let's say we wanted to move things about now to be able to do this right now. And what I would have to do is either select the text, select the rectangle, and move them individually. Now, this seems like a little bit of hard work and other way that we could do it is if we could go ahead and select the text and we were to hold down command and then select the rectangle that would then select both of them and then you could move them like that. But once again, that's still a little bit too much hard work. What we can actually do is create something called a smart object and it really, really easy to do so all you need to do is select the elements that you want to convert into a smart object. So in our case is going to be this piece of text and next rectangle, let's go over to our layers on the right-hand side and select rectangle one, which is this. And then we'll select the texts. So we hold down command so we can select both at the same time. We're then going to want to right-click and then we're going to want to click convert to smart object. So let's go ahead and do that. What you can see is that it's basically combined both of these layers into one, which we could then label text in a wreck tangle. And now what you can essentially do is move this when ever you want and you don't have to worry about selecting multiple things. We've locked in that this is what we want to have as our object and we can just move it about. Now you're not going to want to do this for everything that you create. But in this case, where we've created a rectangle and we've put text inside it. This is a really good case to create a smart object and it's going to save you so much time when it comes to creating those complex thumbnails. 16. Teeth Whitening Trick: This module is a little bit of a bonus module. And basically what I'm going to be doing is showing you a quick trick on how to whiten your teeth as much as you possibly want to so that you will face can stand out a little bit more on your YouTube thumbnails. Now of course, if you've got shiny white TPP already, then this probably doesn't apply for you. But if you take a look at my image, I haven't got the widest teeth, so it's something that I like to do in my thumbnails just to make me feel a little bit more confident when I actually post my thumbnails out there. And it's actually really simple to do. Now the way that we're going to do this is we're going to need to come over to our toolbar. The first thing that we need to do is we need to select the lasso tool and we need to select around our teeth. So let me just go ahead and select the Lasso tool over here. Then I'm gonna zoom in on my face a little bit. Basically what I'm going to do is I'm going to draw an outline of my teeth. So let me just do that. It doesn't need to be completely perfect. But as good as you can get it. There we go. We just join them up. Cool. So we've got our marching ants surrounding our teeth area. Now the next thing that we need to do is we need to come down to the bottom right-hand corner here. Obviously, we need to make sure that we have the right layer selected as well, which I already have. We need to come into this circle here and we need to go ahead and click that. And then from there we need to go and select the saturation option. So we go ahead and do that. And what that's going to do is add a saturation layer on top of our layer that we have right here. Cool. So as you can see down the righthand side, we've now got some options. We've got our preset, we've got wherever we want, the master. And then of course, how much saturation and lightness we actually want to add. Now, what we're going to want to do is we're gonna need to filter this to find all of the yellows in our image. So what we're going to do is we're going to click on where it says Master. And then we're going to want to come down and select the yellows. And then simply what this is going to do is anything that I try and change. It's only going to change anything that they pick up that is slightly yellow, which of course is a little bit like my teeth. So all I'm going to simply do is go over to the saturation section and turn it down. And if you take a look at my teeth, you can see them get a lot whiter. As you can see as I turn it down, my teeth goes white. If I go all the way up, you can see how yellow it looks. I probably wouldn't recommend doing that. But let's turn the saturation all the way down to the bottom. Now if you wanted to go even whiter, you can come down to this lightness section. And with this bar you can turn this the right and it's just going to make it brighter. Now, one thing I see I do recommend is try and make it look as natural as possible. Now, that to me isn't really natural for me. Basically what I like to do is have it around about plus 25 on the lightness and a little bit less on the saturation. But when you go back off this and we flip the saturation on and off, you can see the difference it actually can make TO teeth. Now, like I said, this is very much personal preference. You don't have to go ahead and do this. It's just something that I like to do which completely boost my confidence when I'm putting out my thumbnails on the Internet. So that's how to add whiteness to your teeth. And just a cool little trick. 17. Start to Finish Thumbnail Creation: In this module, what I'm going to be doing is redesigning a thumbnail from start to finish using as many of the techniques that I've demoed in this class. And basically what we have is my demo image that I've imported already. So I've got my starting point and what I'm going to be doing, it's creating a thumbnail for my actual skill share class, which is YouTube for beginners. And this just jump straight into it. I'm just basically going to go through it and I'm just gonna give you commentary on what I'm doing. Hopefully you can see me put all of the different things that I've taught throughout this class into practice. So the first thing that I'm going to do is definitely mask out my image. So let's go ahead and select the Quick Selection Tool. And we need to make sure that my head shot is selected. So this layer, and we're going to quickly go ahead and do this. So let's zoom in a little bit. Cool. So we've gone over a little bit there. So we're gonna go minus fantastic. We need to make sure that this ear is covered, which we have done. That looks okay, so we're gonna go ahead and click Select the Mask. I'm going to zoom in a little bit here and we're just going to clean this up and tested. Then we're gonna shift the edge in a little bit. We're going to smooth it out. So let's go ahead and click. Okay, I'm going to right-click Layer via Copy. And then we know that we've got our layer on top of our original layer and it's shown cool. Actually want to keep the background in this one, but I'm going to blur it out a little bit. So I'm going to make sure that I select the background layer. In fact, let me go ahead and rename this to background. Don't confuse myself. Now I've got that selected. I'm gonna go ahead and select filter. I'm going to go ahead and select Blur and then Guassian blur. Let's go for about 7. Scale for about 56. Not six looks good. Looks a bit natural. It doesn't look too blurred, but it's gotten me sticking out a little bit, which is good. Now the next thing that I want to do is I want to add a drop shadow to my image. So I'm going to go over to my layer. I'm going to double-click on it and I'm going to select the drop shadow. Cool. Let's go ahead and customize this a little bit. Let's make this a little bit in. Drop the size a little bit. I don't want this too harsh. I want it to be very, very subtle. Let me just check the blue. What I can actually do is use this eyedropper tool and it will match what is on this screen here. As you can see. Now, I think that's pretty cool because it matches the background there. And it brings a nice little bit of branding into this thumbnail. So let's go ahead and click Okay on that. I'm, I'm pretty happy with that. Cool. So we've used the drop shadow. Next up. We're going to want to add some text. So I'm going to go ahead and go with the horizontal type tool down the bottom here and select that. Now I'm going to want to go into that and edit it. So we're going to call it YouTube for beginners. Fantastic. Now I'm going to have that down the bottom here, going over my body at the bottom. Don't want it in the way of my face, but that's not looking too great at the moment. So let's go ahead and make sure that's in the center by using this pink line that comes up, that just kind of notifies me that I'm in the center. Okay, cool. So let's go ahead and change the color of this to white. So this double-click on it and click on the colored box at the top and change that to white and task stick. And then I'm going to want to go ahead and grab a rectangle to put around it. So let's go ahead and do that. So we've got our rectangle. I want to change this to red to match the YouTube branding because it's going to be a YouTube class or YouTube related thumbnail. Gonna take the stroke off it because I didn't want to have that on there. And then the next thing that I need to do, of course, is go over to my layers. Just minimize this for a second. And I want to drop this rectangle behind the YouTube for beginners because it's going to sit inside it. Cool. Now one thing that I can probably do is spread this across the entire screen just to make sure that the text is big enough and people can see it even when it's on a mobile device. So that's spread out the rectangle a little bit more than we have. Cool. And then what we can then do is select our text through Command T. And then let's make this text as big as we possibly can inside this box. Fantastic, cool. Now what I'm going to do is let's make that just a little bit bigger. Now the next thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to add a drop shadow to my texts so it just stands out a little bit more inside that red box. So let's go ahead and select drop shadow on the text. Now that one's a little bit too light, I want it to be a little bit harsher than that, so let's turn that at all. Yeah, that's looking good. You see how well that The difference in the standing out there. So this is just a mild drop shadow. When I really turn up that drop shadow, you could see how much that white pops out on that red background. Let's turn that up and let's just make it even. We don't want to cover up the entire red background, but I've always been a little bit pointless having it run it. I mean, that looks pretty good. I'm pretty happy with that. So the next thing we can do just to put a little bit of an extra spin on it is put a white stroke around the red box. Maybe that could look good. So let's go ahead and click Stroke. Now that's way too big, so let's put that on the outside. Let's drop this down to maybe 56 is okay. Six looks good. Cool. So that looks really like it just pops out at me. I'm not sure if I'm too keen on the shadow now if I go back and just edit that, maybe I need to make it a little bit smaller. Let's go size down. Just at the spread a little bit. Now that looks much better. Cool. Now, if we return to minimize this, we can see that that says YouTube for beginners from miles away now. So even if it's on a small device, we can really read that. So I'm really happy with that. Cool. So what's next? I want to add some images. Let me head over to Google. Cool. So it just skip that because I didn't want to have you waiting for it. So we've got our image down here, so let's drag it into our document. There we go. We're gonna need to do some work with this. So let's get it on the relative sizing by clicking on that. And it's drag that down. Pop it to the right of us. And what I wanted to do is angled slightly, because otherwise it looks a little bit awkward. That looks a little bit kind of 2D right now, of course. So let's go ahead and add an outer glow to that. So let's go ahead and click Outer Glow. Now, I don't want this one to be blue. I actually want this one to be white because we got a little bit too much blue in our image now. So let's go ahead and change that to white. And I want to make this a little bit harsh and otherwise it just feels like it's standing into the light blending into the wall behind me so that one looks much better. So that's up the spread a little bit. Nice, I like that. So let's now go ahead and grab one more image. So we want to get a picture of a camera coat. So we've got it here. Let's drag that into our document and it's a little bit too big, are really liked this image in there. And let's angle at the other way. So basically just the angle it by the way, guys, all you need to do is have your image ready to re-size and you just move your mouse to the right of it. And as you can see, it has these kind of two curvy arrows here. This means that you can click, left-click and then move up or down, and that's going to angle the image. So let's go ahead and do that. And it's popped back down the side here niche, use the Adobe Photoshop pink lines to make sure it's the same height as the other icon. Maybe let's make that a little bit smaller. So let's line it up. So there we go. We've got that line to say that its level is drag that across. Beautiful. Let's pop that in there. What I'm going to want to do is add the same glow effect to this camera that I have on the YouTube play button. In fact, I want to make that a little bit bigger because the YouTube paper and is much bigger than the camera. Let's go ahead and just pop that in there. Now what I want to do if I want to make sure that I have exactly the same amount of glowed at the Play button does, is all I need to do is come to the play button on the layer section. And I need to go ahead and select the outer glow. And then I need to hold down Option and simply just drag the outer glow onto my camera layer. And it's going to add exactly the same glow to that. Now what's left? Uh, well, I know what's left. Let's go ahead and white and those teeth. So let's go ahead and select the Lasso tool. This makes sure that we've got our layer selected first as well. So we'll go ahead and select our layer lasso tool, this go ahead and draw. That's a little bit too rough, that one. Let's go ahead and draw around our teeth. And then let's go and add our saturation layer, switch it from master to yellows. And let's drag our saturation down to make those two fi pegs a little bit whiter and add the lightness up a little bit as well. Fantastic, nice fake white teeth there for everyone to see. Now, I think that's pretty much it. Okay, What we'll just quickly do just to finish this up, Let's just go and add all the layers back on just so you can see how this thumbnail is completely constructed. So this add the background on now of course, that is going to be blurred out. But when we put the layer that I cut out of me on top of that, obviously I'm now sticking out with the background blurred behind me. I've got my drop shadow on as well. Let's go and add my teeth whitening in. There we go. Let's go and add the rectangle in. Now, I could have obviously made this one with here as a smart object, but I just haven't for this example, is it go ahead and add the text with the drop shadow on into there. Let's go ahead and add this first image of the YouTube play button. And let's go ahead and finally add the second image of the camera. And there we go. There's our thumbnail that looks professional, is going to stand out. If we zoom out, we can see that even if we saw that on a mobile phone, we'd be able to tell that what that video was all going to be about. And it just stands out to me in my opinion. So that is me creating a YouTube thumbnail from start to finish using pretty much all of the different tools that we discussed in this class. 18. Final Words: Okay, So that is the end of the class. I hope you managed to learn all of the essential tools that you need to know to start creating awesome thumbnails for your YouTube videos. A couple of last things. Firstly, remember to post any of your own pieces of work into the projects and resources section. And I will try my best to get to them as soon as possible for some feedback. And then secondly, if you did enjoy this class, I would really appreciate it if you did follow me on Skillshare, checked out my other classes and be prepared as I will be launching many other classes over the next 12 months. Apart from that, I really do hope I get to see you soon, whether it's on Skillshare again or maybe even your own YouTube video standing out to me now on the YouTube home screen. Thanks for watching once more. And like I said, I hope to see you soon.