Transcripts
1. Introduction: Whether you're just starting a YouTube channel or you've had one for awhile. Creative professional thumbnails is what's going to make sure your video stand out in the sea of content on YouTube right now, your YouTube thumbnail is what people see when they scroll through the sea of content on YouTube. So if yours captivates, attention, looks creative and professional and stands out among the sea of other videos, the chances of your video being clicked are pretty high. So in this class, regardless of your experience in graphic design, I'm going to show you some freeways to make creative YouTube thumbnails that still look professional and are eye-catching. We're gonna break this down into three categories. There's going to be websites. So these are free websites that usually just requires signing up for a free account. There's going to be mobile apps. So these are also free apps that you can download to your phone, your tablet to make thumbnails without having to pay anything. And finally, we're gonna talk about one desktop program that's also free to download and free to use. So you don't have to pay anything to use the tips in this class and you're gonna come away with some professional looking YouTube thumbnails. So without wasting any more of your time, let's hop in, let's get started. Hit enroll. See you in the class.
2. What Makes a Great Video Thumbnail?: First up, let's consider what makes a great video thumbnail. Your thumbnail needs to, first of all, be easy to read or see, even on the small screen. Since YouTube videos or show up on people's phones, you wanna make sure it's glanceable and easy to understand. Next, it needs to be made with vibrant objects, colors, or inviting imagery. It should pop and invite people to click. And third, it should stand out among the crowd of other video thumbnails in search. Your video is not the only video that's going to show up on YouTube. So remember that it needs to be different. Here's some examples of great thumbnails. Mr. Beast channel, you can notice something common through all these different thumbnails. First, the images speak for themselves and their exciting on their own. They don't have a lot of text on thumbnails, yet they're still interesting. What makes these successful is they can tempt you to click on them, even if you didn't see the title of the video next, a channel called Good Mythical Morning retinal link use colorful thumbnails with faces in them. It's proven that YouTube viewers are more likely to click on thumbnails that have faces. So keep in mind that if it relates to your content, a face and your thumbnail will definitely get you more clicks. Something else you'll notice is just like Mr. Beast channels these thumbnails, tempted to click without even having to read the title. You kinda get a good idea of what the video is going to be, even if you couldn't read. And then here's three honorable mentions. Mk, PhD, the infographic show, and John be crisp. You can see that all three of these thumbnails get the idea across really easy and you don't have to do any further digging to know what to expect from the video. As you can see, all three performed really well as far as views are concerned. So what can we learn from these, regardless of what your video is about? If you can either tell the viewer what to expect by showing it in your thumbnail or get them curious enough to click on the image. You just earned yourself of view. So where do you start? First? Browse YouTube for thumbnails that catch your eye. Ask yourself why the thumbnails you chose interest to you, why you clicked on them and make a note of what you can imitate from them as far as the imagery in your thumbnails, if you want to use your own photos, you can again, like we mentioned earlier, if you can show a face and a thumbnail, that will definitely get you more clicks. But regardless of what you have in a thumbnail, make sure it's well-lit, visible, and pops. If you don't want to use your own photos, you can use free stock imagery through websites like Pexels and Pixabay to find images for your thumbnails. All right, it's time to get editing. Let's review what we covered in this lesson. First, a great thumbnail is easy to see and understand. It's tempting to click without even seeing the video title. Second, you can get inspiration from other thumbnails and even use free stock images for visuals.
3. Finding Images: So before we get started on how to make thumbnails and use these templates from these websites and apps on how to just create them. I'd like to first just show you how to find a couple assets, basically photos for your, for your thumbnail. So sometimes you already have a picture or an image that you'd like to use as your thumbnail that's personal to you. But if not, I'll show you for different websites that you can use to find stock photos that are free and high-quality. So first off, one of my favorites is pixels.com. So p e x e ls.com, like pixels but with an e instead of an i. And you can see it says the best free stock photos and videos shared by talent creators. So basically, photographers just share all of their images and videos on here that they want to give people for free. You can see they're really colorful, the really high resolution. So one of the thumbnails I want to show you how to make is going to be a travel thumbnail. So let's go ahead and just type in I'm going to do mountains because that's what I'm thinking of the my head when I think about the image I want to make later. So if you go through mountains, you'll notice there's a ton of really good photos. But let's just go ahead and see if we can find one that would look like you would have a lot of pop and contrast. I like this one right here. If you click on the image, you'll see it a little bigger. And then you can also download it here up top in different resolutions. Youtube thumbnail. You don't really need anything above HD. So you'll notice down here you have custom size as an option. 1920 by 1080 is full HD. Let's go ahead and just click that and click free download. So that's going to be in our downloads for later. You can also sign up for this site if you want. Kinda like to be notified for different things. But I liked that travel image, so we'll stick with that. Who I like this 12. I'm just gonna go ahead and download that as well. If you don't want to, as a pro tip, if you don't want to click and open each one, but you just want to download it real quick. You can also just click this little download icon right here on top of the photo. But those are good. This is also a good photo right here just because it's got a lot of negative space. So when you're thinking about finding images for thumbnails, look for things with negative space or a lot of contrast so that if you're putting text on top of it, you have room for it. But it also look good and not detract from what's behind it. So let's go ahead and download this one too. And I think that looks pretty good to me. You'll notice when you hover over this, it'll give you examples of who the photographers were or what site it pulled it from. And this is one of the sites I was actually going to show you, which is pixabay. So let's just hop over to Pixabay. Pixabay has 1.8 million plus free images and videos. So this is a huge, huge library. Pixels, I believe is little more curated. But Pixabay has just basically anything you can imagine, kinda like a traditional stock photography website. But let's go ahead and search for, I'm thinking a car, possibly for like an auto video. So it's just typing car. So you got new cars, old cars. It's partial looks kind of nice. Just click on it. You'll be able to see ratings from people as well. And then free download, free for commercial use. So let's go ahead and do I guess we'll do the 19-21 836. Go ahead and hit download. I'm not a robot and if you sign up, you don't have to do the capture. So that's another reason it's good to sign up for some of these sites as well. Alright, so I guess I'm not a robot, I'm gonna go ahead and hit download. So now we have a car image. I like this taxi image right here. If we tried to do something like for New York, I'll go ahead and hit download on that as well. The capture here, the third website I wanted to show you is an Splash. Now this is another one that's powered by creators. So people specifically upload their images to this site and it's kind of curated as well. As you can see, really good quality images. Again, I'm going to search for guitar. In case we wanted to upload a guitar video to YouTube or a video related to music, maybe a cover. If you hit this little download icon here, it's as simple as that, no capture or anything required. And then you can also see how to give back to the creator as well. So that's really nice. And splash and other good curated site. And then finally, stock snap dot IO, very similar to Pixabay. But these sites are kind of interchangeable. If he can't find something on one site, you can usually find one on another. But just before jumping into how to make thumbnails, I wanted to just go ahead and show those resources so you have them. So pixels.com, pixabay.com and splashed.com and stock snap dot i, o without any further ado, let's get into making those thumbnails.
4. Planning Your Thumbnail: So when it comes to making YouTube thumbnails, there's a few things we need to get other way. Know what kind of style you're going for before you even start. One of the best ways to do this is find your favorite YouTube creators, browse through their thumbnails and see which ones stand out to you as a general rule to see what catches your eye when it comes to making thumbnails usually want a background of some sort. One way to find a background for your thumbnails is taking the photo yourself. So it can be a photo of you or a photo of something that was in the video. But let's say you don't want to go that route. Another route is finding photos online. In the next lesson, I'd like to just show you how to find your own photos just in case you don't have them. Let's go ahead and get into that first.
5. Editing with FotoJet: So in this section, we're gonna talk about free desktop websites. So these are web sites that already have pre-made templates that you can edit yourself in order to make professional-looking thumbnail is absolutely free. So let's go ahead and hop onto the computer or even your tablet, and let's get started. So the first one I wanted to show you is photo jet.com. So if you just go ahead and type in photo jet YouTube thumbnail in Google, it'll take you directly to YouTube thumbnail maker. So that's the link you're going to need to go straight there. So what you will need to do at the top right is create a free account. I already did that. So if you get, get started. This is going to open your YouTube thumbnail maker. So we have photo jet at the top. You've got saved, shared download, free trial your account. And on the left side you've got all of the templates, a place to add photos, library of things that maybe you've uploaded, a place to get text, place to find Clip Art and backgrounds for these thumbnails. Now the easiest way to create a thumbnail and photo jet is just to go to template at the top left, which is already selected. And they have all selected. So this is all of their templates. You can notice that on the top right of each template, the ones that have the orange icon with the crown means that you'd have to get there plus account, which they do offer a free trial for seven days. If you notice, I click here, get a seven day free trial. And it's not that much money per month, but until you need it, I wouldn't sign up. So if you click on the All dropdown menu, you'll see a bunch of different categories. And usually they're pretty good at really finding the ones that you'd want. For example, I did want to make a travel video. So let's go ahead and click on travel. And when you click on them, you'll be able to see the different template load here on the right side. And these are all kinda nice. But I really like this one here, exploring the highest mountain, when you click on any of the elements that it loads up, whether that's the photo or text or shapes. You'll get this little box that pops up. So as you can see, I clicked on texts, so it does have font. So you can change the font, the size, the color, bold, things like that. But every element you'll click will also have a property tab that's going to allow you to flip it horizontally and vertically, changed the layers. So if you want something in front of something else or below everything, for example, the background, you'd want that all the way to the back or the text. You'd want that all the way to the top. You can also duplicate something. So if you click on it, it'll duplicate what you have. You can also delete something. And then the effect tab is especially nice because you can change opacity. So if you wanna see something behind what you drag, you can use that as well as the tent. So if something doesn't necessarily have a color, you can change the tent in order to change the color as well. Just a quick overview of kinda how the controls work. Let's go ahead and really get start editing. I wanna go back and undo some of the things I did. I don't want photo jet.com, so I'm gonna go to property, delete. And I also don't like this photo in the background. That's not what I want to use already found one. So let's go ahead and hit this delete. Let's go to library. And this will be where you upload photos of your own. If you have an account, it'll give you cloud storage as well if you pay, but don't really need that. I'm going to hit add photo and find one that I downloaded that I really like and others are going to be a travel video. So let's go ahead and do think I'll do this one here with this guy. Once you click on it, it's going to populate it here on the right. And then you can go ahead and drag it to make it bigger. Bam, but it looks pretty good. Now. So this is going to be the background. There's going to be text on top. I'm going to hit this little icon for bottom that'll send it all the way to the back. And finally, I'm going to edit this text and put travel 101. And I'm going to get the most from your trip. And you notice this little line isn't going to work there. So let me go ahead and move that line down. Get the most from your trip. Okay. I liked this image of this guy, but it doesn't really give us the effect now that it's blocking him so we can change the image. That's gotta add photo. And we're gonna change the photo to the one where I had a bunch of negative space. And this is where negative space really comes in. If you want to see someone behind the, the text, you don't want to hide the thing that is going to be a much better photo for what we wanna do. One thing to look out for when you're making a thumbnail is you don't want it to be too cluttered. So you might have seen thumbnails that just have too much packed in and you don't really know what you're looking at. That's one thing to look out for, but another thing is you don't want it to be so drab that it doesn't catch your eye. So in this case, actually think I'm gonna get rid of that. I'm going to keep this, make this text much bigger. Drop that right here. Love the font, but I'll change the color to white. Get the most from your trip. Like that. Maybe I can make this a tad bigger. Almost looks like the guys are looking at the text. And I'm just going to skip one of these lines. Drag this one out. I'll make this a little bigger. And what I'll do I think is I'm going to write justify the text so I can make it even bigger here. Travel 101, get the most from your trip. And see if I can use any blue or anything here. Kinda like this. Green. But it's just not too bright. That's kinda nice right there, just like a neon. So you can also get an outline if you want. So let's try and outline of black and see what that does. That really makes it pop. But I think it kinda takes away from what we've got going on here. Glow might be nicer because you can change the blur. I might do that on here as well. Some glow. That'll really make the thumbnail pop. Maybe a little more subtle on this here. Travel 101, get the most from your trip. Now if we're ready to download, we can hit this download icon, download, we can change it to JPEG or PNG. I say PNG is going to be the highest quality. And we'll do travel, travel 101, download, download for free. And just like that, we have a brand new YouTube thumbnail, which I think looks pretty good. So that is basically a rundown of how to use photo jet.com. It's a pretty good, simple, easy to use website that's absolutely free. So I suggest checking that out and just making a free account. But let's go ahead and move right along. Next, let's go ahead and move on to canva.com. This is one of my absolute favorites.
6. Editing with Canva: Okay, so now that you have your images picked and you know you want to use for your thumbnails, you're gonna want to edit them. There's two really easy ways to do this. You can either use a program called Gimp, which we'll talk about in just a moment. Or you can use a free Web based service called Can va dot com. This is also mobile app, so if you download this on your phone, you can start editing thumbnails that way. But if you go up here to the left, it created design. If you create an account with these guys, you'll be able to save your design, so that's kind of nice. But as you'll notice, this is great for not even just YouTube. Some nails good for everything. You can use it to create Twitter posts, presentations, wallpapers. And here's what we need. Social media you can use thumbnails covers all of these things for all types of different social media. This is really a great overall around tool for anything you need, but we'll tap YouTube thumbnail and you, as you see it's actually size correctly for YouTube already. So if we open up the tab that is opening. Its gonna give us an option to check out some layouts that they've already made. Now, you could start from scratch if you stroll to the bottom here past all of these different templates somewhere at the bottom. Well, somewhere down there you can just start with an image. Yeah, like these. You can just drop in your images. But I really like using these templates because they're beautifully made. They already dropping a font for you. Okay, so one of the things that we, uh downloaded was a coffee image. So if you know where it is on your computer, just drag it on top, and it will upload the photo, as you can see right here on the left side. Actually use this service to make the icon for this class, so it's really easy to use that way. So if we go back to layouts while it's uploading, let's just choose one that would have to do with coffee or something that would look nice with coffee in the background. Let's just tap this one here. All right? So you'll notice right here. It says free. So not all of these templates are free. They have. Ah, money icon. But you can get around that. So let me actually show you how to do that with one that's supposed to be paid. So let's just go with this one here. See how it has a dollar icon. Let's go back, toe up loads and dragging our photo It automatically resize. Is it in everything? This isn't a good goodly out to show. Honestly, it's kind of taking away. What? Looks nice. Um, let's see here. Looking for one that's not gonna cover that cup. And these are all free with. They're giving too much away. Okay, let's try this one. So might look good. Okay, let's try this guy. Okay. We drag over our coffee cup, it already drops it into the background. Gave it a filter. I really like that color, though, so I'm just gonna take it away. Okay, Now, the cool thing here is you can edit all of this text. Not only can you resize it however you want, but, um, you can also change the color as well of your text as well as the font. And they have just plenty to choose from. It's insane. How many they have. Another cool thing they have is elements here. So you've got things you can add such a shapes. So you need a circle in your image or you need some lines. These air pretty cool right here. If you go for lines, you can drop in some really nice looking lines. Get really creative here. Illustrations. Now, these most of these air free. But as you get down to the bottom, some of them aren't so I really have never had to pay for anything. Honestly, because, I mean, all of this is good as it is. Really? Um So Okay, so, like, I was showing you the layout it shows isn't free, it's paid. But the way to get around that is to drop your own image. Because what what costs is the image? They're trying to pay royalty for the image. But if you have your own image here, all set So as you can see, this is a really easy way and really easy tool. And as soon as you decide what you want, let me just show you may be one more example of this you to thumbnail template here. Let's just go to this one. Social media rebel Lee Revolution. All right, let's go toe up loads. It's just drag something else. In this time, let's head to this one is another image I downloaded. See how it already re sizes? It's beautiful. Much just go with best laptops ever. 2017. I think this is actually an icon. It's from over here somewhere in the elements. But I'll just leave it there. It doesn't really matter. And then if you want to download it, we're gonna hit. Download up here and you can choose file types. All of them are free. So it's just a JPEG download. It's gonna prepare your design, gives you a little quote for some, could be motivated. I really love this site because I don't know if it gets any better, huh? You know, you have a really great quality image that came from, what, two minutes of work, And, uh, this is what it looks like. I mean, that's already a wonderful thumbnail, if you ask me. So this is one of the simplest, easiest tools that I found. And like I said, you can use a mobile as well. But now, if you'd like to go a little bit more in depth in tow, editing, um, let's jump into gimp
7. Editing with Crello: Alright, the next website I like to show you is Trello.com. So that's CR ELL. Oh, that's COM. Now Trello is another website that very similar to Canvas, but if you didn't like the layout of Canvas, Trello is another way to go. You get ten free downloads with Trello or as Canva, you don't have to upgrade. You can download as many as you absolutely want without having to purchase their subscription. So that's something to keep in mind on Trello. So if you go to Trello.com and create yourself a free account and again, don't have to pay anything. And you type in youtube. You're gonna see YouTube thumbnail. And again, we're gonna get a ton of different templates. Now you can do blank YouTube thumbnail, or we can use one of their pre-made templates. Sometimes that's one of the easiest way to start. I'm gonna go down here and find one that might look good for a car vlog, something that looks kind of new age or edgy. Actually, I think this one's kinda nice as business one. So again, you don't have to go with what they say it's four. Go ahead and start with the template and then see where that takes you or what you can do to kind of customize it to what you need it for. So as it loads up here, I can go ahead and click this background and delete it, and I really need that. If I go to photos, you can type in maybe car and you'll get some car images, but these look way too staged. I'm gonna go to my files and I just uploaded this car image v. It uploaded image. It'll allow you to upload an image and depopulated here. Click on it. If I go over here and hit set as background, ALL resize it automatically. And I'm just going to scoot it over here to the left side. That looks pretty good to me. And I don't like this spacing of all this. So I'm gonna go ahead and move it over a bit. I do like how it has this gradient here already premade. And I'm gonna go ahead and do just like vlog 001. And we'll put stuff, how to put NYC and then go ahead and get rid of this. And we just put my name, click it and move it over, line it up with the others. And I do not, do not like this font. Siloed guy here. That's pretty good. Actually. Oxygen. Let's stick with oxygen. Here we go. Oxygen, boom. And quite honestly, and really digging this already. But I'm going to, I'm going to click on these others. And I'm going to change the coloring to be more blue. Because that kinda goes with what everything else looks like. And I'm going to copy the color and paste it to every single one. Notice that there's the little color code there. And it allows you to do that. One thing that I notice on Trello That doesn't happen on canvas is it does take a while to load these things. Versus Canva was pretty instant on how it polluted everything. So we're almost done color-coding these assets to be the same as everything else. I do notice there are some behind there. I don't actually need this one. And there's also a little line there. I'm gonna get rid of that. And then placed my little box back. And I think that looks pretty good. Really. Think I'm going to stick with this. And then when we go ahead and do is download at the top right, let's change it to PNG download. You get ten free downloads with Trello or as Canva, you don't have to upgrade. You can download as many as you absolutely want without having to purchase their subscription. So that's something to keep in mind on Trello. But here is that thumbnail, and I think it looks pretty sweet. So that's a good way to make another YouTube thumbnail for absolutely free. I'll show you one more website and then we'll move on to mobile apps. So let's head to the next website.
8. Editing with Snappa: Alright, the final website I'm going to show you is Napa.com. So snap, I like the others has tons of templates. All you have to do is register for a free account and you can get started. Let's show you how to use snap a.com. If you go to snap a.com, you'll see social media posts into sky YouTube thumbnail, ready to go. So let's go ahead and open that up. What I'm gonna do is make a thumbnail for New York City with what to visit or what to see. So let's go ahead and see what kind of templates they have that are available to us. I do kinda like this one because it stands out. I see this type of thumbnail quite a bit and they do end up clicking on it. So we'll go to background at the top left has this little arrow showing you where to go. And I m gonna go ahead and hit remove because we already have a background that I don't want. Let's go to Uploads because I already have an image I found on one of the websites I saw these taxis. It's going to upload that to our gallery. If we click on it, it'll go ahead and upload it right to where you need it. So this is super fast, easy way to just get, get it and get out. Next, I'm gonna go ahead and change YouTube to say New York. Or let's do NYC. That even looks better. Nyse. Let's do places to visit. Bam, places to visit. Right? I don't like how there we go. I like the opacity to be a little lower on that. Let's see how the one behind places would look. If I were to drop the opacity. I kind of like these to be more solid, so I'll leave those like that. But what I could do, however, I'm going to click everything, shift click so I can select everything and move it to the middle. Because I think it would look a little better. And we're kind of done. So if I click on the background and I do effects, we can add an overlay as well, which might give it a little bit more pop when we're looking at the search page. So let's go ahead and just make an overlay that makes that text pop a little more. I'm going to blur it just a tad as well. Saturated up. And quite honestly, I really like that. So we're gonna stick with that. If you were to want to add more text, you can go to text at the top. They also have graphics like the other websites do have as well that you can add. Let's go ahead and hit that one. Like that guy. So this one will be a coffee icon. I'll change the color to white. And then I might find another one for my friend, another one that looks like a plane. Let's see for travel. So I'll use this one. And I'll also change this one to white as well. Move that up to the top right. And that's what we've got. So if we hit download at the top right, and then we do Web Optimized JPEG. That'll give us a small size while also still being HD here on snapper. Let's go ahead and open it up. That's what it looks like. And I think that looks pretty sweet. So that's another way to make a YouTube thumbnail for free using snap a.com.
9. Additional Websites: Some other websites I would suggest checking out when you do have some time if you wanted even more options that are free, there's something called dashboard dot, dot co. It's basically if you type in Viz me YouTube thumbnail, you'll see another thumbnail maker that way. Another one is hc maker. So PIC Maker.com, you'll be able to make free YouTube thumbnails that way. And finally, Adobe Spark. So if you have an Adobe account already, they have a fantastic thumbnail maker. That is again, plug and play. And the nice thing about Spark is you can also use that as a mobile app. So I'd suggest checking out Adobe Spark when you have some time as well. Alright, so let's go ahead and move on to mobile apps. What mobile apps can you use to create awesome, fantastic YouTube thumbnails without a lot of work.
10. Canva Mobile App: So I'd like to show you a couple of resources that I love to use. Some apps that are on mobile. Two of my favorites are gonna be Canva, just like the website that we found, and also Adobe Spark Post. These are two free resources that make making thumbnails easy. Let's start with Canva. If we go ahead and open up Canada, the design is also similar to the website. You will have to create a free account in order to use the app, however, so I suggest doing that if you haven't already. Next up, you'll see the search bar at the very top. Go ahead and tap on that and just type in YouTube thumbnail. And that'll bring up all of the templates they have specifically for YouTube thumbnails pre-made that we can start editing. You'll notice that the ones that have a little free icon on the bottom right of them are going to be free. They don't have any assets in there that you would have to remove if you didn't want to pay for their premium subscription. However, if you do see one that you really like, that doesn't have that free icon. Usually the asset that's inside of it can be swapped out for something custom of your own anyway, and I'll show you how to do that. So don't let the templates that don't have free on them scare you away because there is a way to get around that. Let's go into an example of one of those. So you'll notice here on the left side my top five simulation video games, it doesn't have the free icon, but I want to use that template because it looks pretty cool. Let's go ahead and tap on it. And you'll notice it has the Canvas icon there on the right side on top of the lady with the VR headset that tells you that that's the asset or something in that area is premium. So let's go ahead and tap on it. And here on the bottom menu, if you scroll all the way to the right, you'll notice this little icon tap on that. And that'll tell you the resource that costs money. So you'll notice it's the virtual reality gamer from Getty Images. So it is the image. So all we have to do to get around paying for this template is swapping that out with something of our own. So since I already have an image that I can swap it out with, will do that. But before we do so let me give you a rundown of how the app works. The very top left, you're going to see the home icon. To go back to the homepage. You'll also see the three.me in order to see some things on how to save your image and share it and resize it. You've got the crown icon, if you'd like to go ahead and upgrade, you've got this download icon as well and share as well. On the bottom menu, you're gonna see this icon here for duplicating objects. You're going to see deleting objects with the trash can, replace an object so you can just swap went out in one-click. Effects is going to allow you to change effects for photos. Seeing with filter, adjust has some more specific adjustments that you can use for sliders like brightness, contrast, saturation, et cetera. Crop will allow you to do just that. Philip will let you flip the asset position, will allow you to change where it is on the layers. So if you have something on top of another thing, it can move it forward or to the back, for example, for a background, you also have a paintbrush icon and finally, this transparency icon. The others you won't really need to use. Now that you have a rundown of that, you also have a Zoom icon in the bottom left. So if you want to zoom in to see what you're doing, you can do so. But let's go ahead and get started. So let's replace this photo by, first of all, just tapping on it and hit replace on the bottom left. And I'm gonna go into my camera roll and find this image of me that I like. So once I tap on it, it drags it right in. And if I do crop, that'll allow me to crop it just where I want it to be. And just like that, it has dropped it into my image. And you can see these assets, these other assets are all over. I kinda like the fact that this one on the top left is black. I don't like this blue one down here. I'm going to change that to black as well, just to give it something else. You can also rotate your assets or anything using the two arrowed icon and dragging it. I'm just going to double tap this text here so I can change it. And I'm going to tap in ten creative photo and video ideas. And I'm just gonna get rid of the text here. And I think I'll get rid of that icon as well by hitting the trash can on the bottom. So there's delete element and delete group. Deleting the element will delete, just one thing. Deleting the group will delete the whole square. So let's do delete group. And I'd like to add just a little icon of a camera. So let's tap on this plus sign here in the bottom right. And you're gonna notice there's templates, uploads, photos, elements, text, videos, camera roll, background folders and more. Text will allow you to add more text. But let's do elements. And I'm going to search for an icon of a camera. And the ones that have the pro icon you would have to pay for. So let's not do that. Let's find something that isn't probe, but still looks kinda cool. I think this one here on the left side looks pretty nice. Drag that where I want it and resize it. And that looks pretty good there. Well, let's zoom in. I like that a lot more. Alright, I'm gonna add an exclamation point here at the end. And honestly, I think this thumbnail is looking pretty good. So we'll go ahead to the top right and just hit this download icon to save it. It's going to go ahead and prepare your design. And just like that, you are done so you can continue editing or go to your homepage. And our thumbnail is finished. This is what our thumbnail looks like once it's done. And I think it looks pretty nice. But let's say you don't like any of the templates. They do have a lot of great templates. If you go back to home, type in YouTube thumbnail, they do have a lot of great templates and that's going to be the absolute easiest way without any graphic designing a required. But if you wanted to start from scratch and just play around, tap on the blank one at the very top left. And it's going to automatically asking if you want to use templates, just swipe down where this little pill is. And we have a blank canvas. You can make a complete thumbnail just from this because Canada has all the resources you need, whether it's photos, text, icons, you name it. So let's go ahead and start. I'm gonna tap on this plus icon on the bottom right. And I'm going to tap on photos. Now this is their photo library, not mine. And let's say I wanted to make a video maybe about like finding time for yourself. I'm going to scroll down and I see this one right here with these mountains and this little sun, sun flare. I really liked that. It looks pretty serene. We're gonna go ahead and drag it where I want it. Now if I go back to the bottom right, I'm going to add some text to tap on the plus sign and hit text and then give you some stylized ones already. Let's see if any of these would look kind of nice. Maybe this one here. Now if you double tap on one of the elements, you'll see that this square is in a bigger square. So those are two linked objects together. And I'll tap on the next one here. And what I'll try to do is with this bottom one selected, I'll go to the bottom here and it'll allow us to edit our text. And that lets me change the color of one without the other. That looks pretty good. I think I m gonna go back to this background and lower it just a bit. Simply because that's going to make it look a lot better. Now if I go back down to elements, I'm just going to look for maybe some abstract shapes that I can use. Okay, so I found a couple of shapes that I like here. And I'm just gonna edit this globe here to be the same color palette as well we already have. So I'm gonna take away all of the blue. And the same over here. I'm gonna get rid of the red and maybe change this to, let's see, possibly something more like the mountain. And just like that, you already have another YouTube thumbnail that we've completely made from scratch. So if we download it, I think that looks pretty good. Now we'll move on to the next app, which is Adobe Spark Post.
11. Adobe Spark Post Mobile App: All right, so this is how to use Adobe Spark Post. You will need a free Adobe account in order to use this app. And it will prompt you to try and get the premium subscription in order to get kinda some extra assets and templates. And however, you don't have to sign up for anything to use it, it is totally free. So at the top right, you're gonna see this search icon. Tap on that. And let's put in YouTube thumbnail. And you have a slew of different templates. However, all of these ones with this little badge, this yellow badge, are going to be the premium templates. So you're going to want to avoid those if you don't want to pay a cent. So this very top one here, I noticed that in the middle it has two different sides. I really loved that. That look for templates. Let's go ahead and hit re-mix this template. And you'll see the Adobe Spark watermark on the bottom right. Tap on that and that'll allow you to remove it. On the bottom it says remove the watermark on this project. And you're going to have a couple of different options on the bottom, ad will allow you to add images, video, text, icon, sticker and logo. Colors is going to allow you to change the colors of whatever's selected on your palate. So for example, if you just click on it, it will change the color palette for you without having to do basically any work, which I really do enjoy because it gives you a good starting point, even if you don't want to stick with this, It's a good way to just get started. So let me actually find one that I like. I think I'm gonna do this one here. I really like this palette. So I'm going to hit done. And if we go ahead and tap on that photo on the right side, I'm going to hit replace on the bottom left and change it to something in my photo library. Found the photo I want, so I drag that in, drag it where I want it. Perfect. Now over here, I don't really want these waves, so I'm gonna tap on them and hit delete at the bottom. You can also duplicate them and select multiple things or change the order of it on the Layer Mask. You can also adjust it by rotating it, nudging it, flipping it changed the color or the opacity. But I'm gonna go back to edit and hit delete. Let's select the text that I want. I don't want this one here. Delete, going to double-tap on the three, make it 15, drag that to the middle, make it a little bigger. And down here I'm going to change this text to say photo tips. Let's do photo tips and tricks. Okay? And as you drag it, it's going to resize it for you automatically. I am noticing them and have to recenter this little better. I do not like this font, so I'm gonna tap on the text and hit font. And let's find some font that isn't too distracting. Looks kinda clean. Finding font can be the hardest thing for me. I think I like this one here, so we're going to stick with that. I'm liking this color scheme a little bit, but not enough. So I'm going to tap on my face and adjust the looks here. So looks is gonna give you the color filter you have. Really gonna make it grayscale instead, like that a little better. And I'm also going to change the color of this text, something more neutral. I might even change the element here in the back. There's blue to black. And there's another one I notice here that's black. And I think that looks pretty good. I'm going to adjust and just take away the filter altogether. And then I'll go to enhance, brighten it up a little bit to give it some pop contrast as well. And I really actually like that thumbnail. So we're gonna go ahead to the very top right on the share icon, and we'll hit Save image. There it is. So that's one image with Adobe Spark. Let's see if we can make one more. And this time maybe we'll do one that has to do with budgeting tips. I like this one here that says color Intro to color theory. Let's tap on that and see how easy it is to remix this a little bit. So I'm gonna get rid of this watermark here by tapping on it. I'm going to tap on the background, going to hit Edit and replace. So I imported this one that looks like money. And you can already see it did a good job of just adding it there in the background. But it could be much bigger so that you can see that it's money. I'm gonna get rid of intro to don't really need that at all. Just delete. All right, so now I'm going to double tap in and actually change what the text says. And I'm going to input budgeting tips. And just like that, we have a thumbnail that actually looks pretty good, I think would stand out. So it'll go to the very top right, and at the share icon, hit solid color and save image. There it is. And that looks pretty professional to me because it already cuts out the text. If you wanted to do that with on your own. If the text wasn't already cut out. When you tap on the text, you can go down to effect and you can see outline, shadow. Cutout. Cutout is currently the coolest one. So those are a couple apps that I love to use to make YouTube thumbnails on Mobile. Hopefully, that was helpful.
12. Intro to GIMP: Now I'd like to show you how to use a program on Windows and Mac so that if you want to download something and get even more in-depth and more creative.
13. Editing with Gimp: Okay. Welcome back, guys. Now, if you liked can va dot com and you don't need any more help, you can just skip this block. Um, there's no need to watch this little clip if you're fine now. But if you wanted to do some more in depth editing, for example, I'm gonna edit this photo right here into a thumbnail and actually trace around myself and give myself in outline some things that will require photo shop like features, but free version. Um, if you don't need that, just skip it. But otherwise Well, I'm gonna use his gimp. So if you searched that on Google, the very first link there and then if you go down and you hit download directly, that's what you need. You're basically gonna install a program that looks like this. OK, so this right here is gimp. Basically, it's a knockoff of photo shop, and what you can do is almost everything you can do in photo shop. But I'm just going to show you some simple things to do. So first of all, right off the bat, you're going to need to make your own canvas or format this image correctly for YouTube. So let's go up here and hit file than new. And this is where you're gonna hit the image. Size or dimension? I'm gonna make it HD so 12. 80 by 7 20 And you could see I just enter that there and then hit. Okay, so now this is resized perfectly for YouTube. I'm gonna zoom out just a bit by hitting the minus sign on the keyboard, and I'm gonna go ahead and go into my folder and just drag one of my images on here. You can see it's already too big. So if you go over here to this little this little bar here in this box, you'll find the scale tool right under the magnifying glass. If you click on that and then click on your image, drag on the corners in and notice how I'm being squished and it's not really natural looking. If you go back over here and tap, keep aspect that will make sure it re sizes correctly and you don't get all worked. I think that's probably a good size. Let its scale and then go up here to this thing that looks like a kind of like a compass the move tool, and then just select your image and drag that where you need it. That's pretty good right there. All right, there's good. Okay. Now I actually wanna background behind myself. So what I'm gonna do is drag another image on, say, this city. Actually, I like that image. Change my mind. Let's do the let's do the plane. Have a few options here. Okay? I'm gonna have to resize it again. So I'm gonna go to the scale tool tap on the image, drag in on the corners and as you noticed, keep aspect is already on, so I don't have to click that its scale let it scale itself. And as soon as I'm done with that, I'm gonna move it with the move tool. Move it right over here. So this is gonna be my behind myself. That's the idea. Now, over here is your layers. You can see that Thea Picture that you see right here is on top of me. It's on the top. I'm going to drag that right below me so they can see I'm on top of the plan now. If we select the image of me and then go over here to this thing that looks like a lasso free select tool and then hit shift and plus T to zoom in. I can select by clicking around myself. Now, I'm just using the mouse and moving some points. I'm just basically creating an outline around myself because what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna cut out the background behind myself. You see the bricks on the wall on. I'm also going to put a small, like shadow behind me. So to do that, I'm gonna have to get rid of that background. And this is how you do it. This is one way you can also use this little wand magic, select tool. But I notice sometimes that doesn't get exactly where I need. So I end up just taking in doing it by hand. It's a little easier notice that I can't select any further because it's too far away. Hit the minus. Zoom out. All of this is just blank area. So doesn't matter what you select out here. Um go ahead and hit, delete and you see what happens. It deletes that area. So if I hit control Z to go back, what I want to do is delete the rest the opposite. So go to select on the top left invert basically selecting the opposite of what we just drew around. And now I'm gonna hit delete And now I have what I want. So what I'm gonna do to make myself have ah, have a shadow, actually, is if you hit control shift A You're basically getting ready of your selection. What I want to do, since I have myself selected, is I want to make a shadow. So I'm gonna go to tools. No, sorry. Filters and goto light and shadow. I'm gonna go to drop shadow and it minimized it. But un antic allow re sizing or your sizing will get all weird. And this basically controls how big your shadow is gonna be. Just gonna leave it there and hit OK, And what you'll notice here is on the right side of me and kind of separated from the background. That's the look that I wanted. Let's add a little bit of text, go over to the a icon, select this color right here that's naturally black and just choose a color and hit OK, tap anywhere. Well, first Let's change the front as you'll see this A sans font. If you click on the double A, you can choose a different fund. I'll go with Scribble box. It will change the size to 40 inter. Okay, let's tap anywhere and just put this is an example. All right. I'm going to select all of this by double triple tapping, actually, and make it bigger by adjusting the size, you can also enter it here. So, like, 80 for 100. 200. That's actually pretty good. I'm going to select somewhere in the middle of these words and backspace and hit Enter. So it drops down to another line and I'm also going to move it over here. Hoops Control Z, move it over here. I'm gonna put this text under myself so that I'm in between myself and the background. So I'm gonna take this layer. I'm a dragon below me and the drop shadow. And there you go. I'm gonna hit. I'm just going to select the background because that's not visible, and you can see kind of what I have here. So this is exactly the size you want for YouTube. And this is also already a YouTube thumbnail. And if you wanted to go a little bit further and make your text stand out, you can select the area where your text is, go up to filters and repeat the drop shadow. And now that's also standing out. So that's kind of cool. Some people like to cull, arise their image and make it all bright green or blue. I'm going to do that for you. Let's go, Teoh this image where the plane is that go to colors and colorize. What this is going to do is just color your whole image to the hue that you select. So if I drag this left and right, you're seeing that the color changes. It's kind of a nice blue did. Okay, and now it kind of stands out. Now, if you want to export this and make this a file, go to file export to example dot PNG. Let's make that J peg J P. G for a smaller file. Gonna put that on my desktop export and export again. So now if I go to my desktop, go to example, I can find it. This is my image so you can see there's another easy way that's free. You don't have to download photo shop, but if you want to go a little in depth on if you need any more information about how to use gimp, there's some great tutorials on YouTube. Beacon search up. But this just shows how to make a simple thumbnail if you need something a little more in depth than what you can get on canvas. So hopefully that helped you out and I'll talk to you in the next video about what your project is.
14. Class Project: So for this class project, I'd love to see you make your own thumbnail. You can use canvas dot com or gimp, and I'd love to see you use one of them just to make a really simple, beautiful thumbnail. I mean, you have the tools at your disposal. Now you know where to find the photos. You know how to make an image and edit it through Canada or gimp. So I'd really love to see what you come up with with the tools provided for your class project. Drop your thumbnail in a project below so I can see it and give you some feedback and give you some tips. If you have any questions, we could talk about it down there as well. I really think you can come up with some great things using these tools so I can't wait to see what you create. And thanks for watching
15. Outro: I'd like to thank you for checking out this class. It's been a pleasure to kinda show you what I've been able to use to make thumbnails for my YouTube videos. And I hope that it's been helpful to you as well. I have some other YouTube classes here on skill share. Feel free to check them out. I've got one on how to make YouTube headers, and I also have one on how to create a successful YouTube channel. So check those out on the bottom. But at the very least, please leave a review. Just let me know what you thought of the class and what I can do better. And I hope to see you guys in the next one.
Storm, Photographer, Videographer, Teacher
