Transcripts
1. Why Good Thumbnails Are Important: Hey, everyone. My name is Joy Remington, also known as Salvage, And today I'm going to be sharing with you the special effects and processes that go behind making an eye catching YouTube thumb. Now it's really well known on the platform that having better thumbnails for your videos increases your click through rate, and that's going to allow more people to see your video. But more importantly, it's going to boost the chances of video being recommended in the YouTube algorithm. Here are a couple of examples I'm going to throw on screen right now some of my previous work that I've done for my channel as well as other clients. And as you can see, it's very colorful. But more importantly, they're eye catching. So the three reasons why we need to be making a really good thumbnails for our videos is Number one. We need to catch the user's attention, like I mentioned before. Stop there, scroll and have your video stick out wherever it's recommended to them, either. In search results for suggested feed subscription feed, you get the point. Number two is to build your brand authorities. So that way, when a viewer clicks on your videos as then later on, they see that same thumbnail style. They're going to have that memory triggered in their brain and think, Hey, that's this guy's channel. I've seen his thumbnails before. It let me click and watch another video. It's very important to have that we're gonna discuss that inside. Of course, Number three is to give a little bit of information about what the video is going to be about. So it's separate from getting the attention. It's going to give good glimpse into what you're going to be going through in the video. So it's important to include all of those three aspects together to create a really good thumbnail that's going to again drive up that click through rate in. Today's lessons were going to be going through everything from shadows, lighting, text placement backgrounds and more hope to see you inside
2. Document Creation: Okay, so the program or software that we're going to be using to create the thumbnails is photo shop. If you don't have photo shop, it's like 10 bucks if you're a student in high school or college, and I think it's 20 bucks. If you just want to buy the specific program and you can bundle it with illustrator and something else. I don't know, just go Teoh adobe dot com and figure it out. I use Creative Cloud Suite, so I have all of the trade of cloud applications. But this is the singular best software to create any type of design work out there on the market right now. If you want your thumbnails to look the best, this is what I recommend you use, and we're gonna be using it for the rest of the tutorial. So when you first opened Photoshopped, you want to go to create new here on the left hand side of the screen where my mouse is currently pointing, and then you want to go and copy the settings on the right side of this window that pops up Now, I've actually saved the thumbnail template, which is 12 80 by 7 20 you can copy the rest. Hear the background white rgb color because we're gonna be using it digitally on the computer screen and the mixture. You change this pixels as well. It can be a little bit confusing. You know, if you're just starting to use Photoshopped, you see inches, centimeters will like I don't know. Uh, yeah, so just always choose pixels. And then the orientation here is landscape, not portrait, and that unchecked the art boards. We don't need to use art boards for this. We're just creating one singular document on that basketball will be using. So just create the document here by selecting this button down here and you'll be greeted with a blank canvas. Now, the reason why we're doing 12 80 by 7 20 instead of 1920 by 10 80 is because sometimes you tube system doesn't allow a file size larger than I believe, two megabytes to be uploaded as a thumbnail. And sometimes if you have a lot of crazy stuff going on and you save stuff at a high quality like I do and I'll show you how to do. But with getting around that you to just not going to accept a large file size in the 1928 by 10 80 format. So that's why I used 12 80 by 7 20 It's not like people are gonna notice the quality difference anyways. When you're scrolling through your YouTube feed, it's gonna be big enough. It's gonna be perfectly fine. That's what I've always used from my thumbnails, and they've done extraordinarily well. So that's the file size that we're going to be using for this tutorial.
3. Background Development: Now, the first thing you need to do when you're making your thumbnail before you do anything else is figure out what you're going to do for your background so you could do something very simple like coming down here to the Grady in tool and then, you know, creating a greedy and then putting some text on top of that. But what I've actually found to look a little bit better is taking an actually detailed image from, like Google. So say you're making a YouTube thumbnail and you you're playing a video game, right? So you want to put over watch it. It's a very popular video game nowadays, So just go to images here. And, you know, we're not gonna be stealing anything or putting anything that some though we shouldn't, because we're gonna be editing it. So here's an image right here. Um, let me save this really quick or just copy. You can copy it, go back into photo shop, press control and V, Or if you're on a Mac breast command and V on your keyboard, I'm gonna scroll out holding Ault and then dragging in so that it's centered here. So make sure you hold Ault on Dragon so that it stays in the aspect ratio if you don't hold all, um, and you hold shift. This is actually a new change Photoshopped made. It's gonna be all lacking crazy. Used to be able to hold off on shift and do it, but photo shot actually changed that. So now you just have to hold all and, uh, it'll zoom in like that, okay? And then make sure you just adjust it so that it's at the edges of your document here. Okay. And a good way to make sure that it centered is you press control and a on your keyboard. If you ever need to do this, go to the move tool and then select these two buttons at the very top. And I don't make sure that anything is centered within the document that your creative I'm gonna press control and d on my keyboard to dis elect that. And then we're gonna go to filter. We're Goshen Blair and then turn it up a lot. And as you can see, it's going to start taking effect in the background here. So let's go for about 9.6 to 10 years, Go to straight flat 10 and then click. OK, and then you're gonna have a blurred background here. Then the next thing I like to do is press control or command you on my keyboard and then that should bring up the hue slash saturation on your screen mind was on my other monitor, and then we're gonna bring the saturation all the way down, like maybe negative 80. Have a little bit of color in there, but not too much. And then on top of that, we just believe a background layer here. On top of that, we're gonna go to the brush tool here, going into the brush settings here at the very top, make sure the hardness is all the way down at zero. It's gonna be very important. And make sure the size of somewhere around 400 or larger and a quick little shortcut that I like to use to increase or decrease my brush sizes is using the bracket keys. So if you use the right bracket key like this, it will go up in size. And if you go to the left bracket, key will go down in size like that So it's very interesting feature that I like to use a keyboard shortcut. But now that we have the size of our brush, all right, and the hardness is at zero. We want to go to the color swatches here at the bottom. And this should bring up the color foreground in your photo shop menu again, Mind was on the other monitors tried to drag it over, but you want to make sure that you're choosing this light blue color. So go is light blues. You can sky blue something like that. Here's the exact color code. If you want a copy mine to the T, but you don't have to. It's relatively similar. Either way, you do it. Press okay. And then we're going to just go over the entire image on a separate layer. Mind you not on this layer on a separate layer. Go over the entire image like this, or, alternatively, what you could do. If you another way to do that issue, just make sure that this color is your background color and then just press control backspace, and it will cover the entire document with that color. After we do that, what we want to do is double click on this layer. So it opens up the layer styles panel, goto the blend mode and then goto overlay, and this creates a really, really cool effect. I'm gonna turn the opacity there just a little bit. Maybe 60 50 50 percents seems pretty good. And then that should take precedent over that. So now, instead of having this boring, dark background, we have a color. And you can change this as well, right? So you can change this to green yellow, whatever red. If you want to make a purple thumbnail purple looks really good with this effect. And then what we're going to do is we're in a press control and J and duplicate that. And if we wanted to create a separate color, we can go back and press control and you want to keep it open the hue slash saturation panel move this around. So we wanted a purple thumb now, right, But we still want to maintain a little bit that blue. You can play around with it, play with the capacities here and create a really unique color. And then another tip is just to go back into your brushes right on another layer on top, and you say we wanted a bit more purple. We can add splashes or pink. Let's say Let's say we want more pink. We can add splashes of pink throughout here on a separate layer, so again, create a separate layer. Using this button down here at splashes of pink with your brush, go to the blend mode by double clicking on the layer and going to overlay. And then, you know, if you want a space that little bit more, you can go back to filter, blur. Gaussian blur and turned up the Gaussian blur a little bit. And now we have more splashes of pink, and it's really interesting way to create a background effect. I've never actually taught this. Of the only things I've actually taught on my YouTube channel. It's just going here, bring it down to, like, maybe 10 15 20% to create a nice little blue effect on it. I've never actually shown anybody had to do this. Although it is very simple, it's a nice way to create a nice color palette for your thumbnails. So that's how to create a cool background. I showed you two different ways. You can use the Grady and Tool here. And, you know, if you say you wanted something else, You know, I have a bunch of different safe radiance here. Said you wanted an orange one or it Go ahead. Do that. Um, you want something a little bit more, Uh, weird. Could choose one of these or create one of these rather and do something like that and then put text on top of that. But we'll be getting to that in the next module. So thank you for watching and let's continue one.
4. Crafting Text: Okay, so now that we have our background created, the next step is to create the text that we want the viewers to see on the thumbnail. And this is where you truly make or break a good design. If you have bad looking text, some thought that's difficult to read. Or, you know it doesn't work well with the background. It's blended in its blending into much your your son. That's not gonna look good and your videos not gonna get very many views just flat out how it is. And one of the best things that I like to do is make sure consciously in the back your mind , actively thinking about it. Does my text stand out enough from the background so that if I zoom out here, I can actually read what it's saying? Not doesn't look cool? Not so. I have some cool effect on it, but can actually read what it's saying, and then everything else is secondary to that. So the first thing we need to do let's go over to the text layer here, the horizontal type tool and then choose a thought. I like using industry. It's a font that I get with Adobe Type kit, which is like a $70 a year subscription. I realized, you know, people are gonna pay that if you're not a graphic. Designers do this for your work or something like that, but it's a nice thing that I like to use. It's pretty valuable to me. You can download many fonts off a website called the font dot com, a link that in the course somewhere, you can go to the font dot com and download a bunch of free to use fonts. You can then include into your thumbnails and designs. You just install it right off of the website you downloaded to your computer, you right click on the file and installed. But for the purposes of this video, I'm just going to use industry with adobe type kid here and just click on the document and change the font size to something you can see. It's a little bit too big. Let's go to 30 here. And let's say we were making a YouTube thumbnail on Overwatch top five plays. So we changed the text here toe white so we can see what we're doing. And let's start off with something very simple. So just top five. Great. And then let's go to the move tool here at the top, left control and a on our keyboard and center it according with. Okay, now we have this part. We want to add more, of course. So we're gonna press Ault and dragged down, so it creates a duplicate of the text. Go to the text tool again to change what this says. Some top five plates. Very simple. Easy to understand now is where the design elements really come into the text. So, in my mind, because I've been doing this for such a long time, I can see something that I'd like to dio. So what I'm gonna do is I'm actually gonna do that. I'm going to remove the top here from five. I'm gonna create the five and make sure that it's really large here. Something like that, that I'm gonna go up here, credit another text layer, like the way I showed you before. And then we say that and then re put this top here. And then the next thing I'm going to do is make sure everything's a little bit pushed out. So it's not on top of each other, and I'm actually gonna change it from medium toe. Bold. Now, not every fund is going toe Have this option here to change. So what you can do is you go to the character window here and click on this old icon. And if you don't have this fun your Dr Panels here you can go toe window, and then you you'll be able to find character right here, and you can click that and that will pop up and you could drag it into your workspace. Do you want to go to the character options here? Make sure you have gold selected if you don't have the option to change it directly from the text layer. And I'm gonna change that. The bold I think it stands out a little bit more rather than medium on injured industry. Here we'll go bold. And the same thing for this five. A bold we go. All right, now we have five top plays now. I'm actually going to change the size of this by again pressing control and tea on my keyboard t for transform holding Ault. I'm going to drag up and then I'm gonna align it here in a cool thing to do if you can't ally in it. If you have, like your snap guides on what you can do is you can press control and r on your keyboard so mine just disappeared there. But it'll appear if you don't have it already, press control or command R on your keyboard and will bring up the rulers tab here at the top and that you could drag down a guide. Make sure it's aligned with the very top of something that you want to align with it like that. And then we'll drag another one down below here, vertically on the five. And now, when we dragged the top to the very top of here, it's gonna snap to the guy that we just play. So it's even same thing with plays. We want to put this to the bottom. Something like that. I'm actually going to increase the size of plays, so there's not so much negative space between top and plays here. Let's just do that. Make sure it's all working together and flowing nicely, and no, it's gonna take you a little bit of time, especially if you don't do this often. They're going to be playing around in photo shop, trying to see what you like trying to see what works, what looks good, and that's completely fine. Not every thumbnail is going to take you five or 10 minutes to make, especially at the start. So now we have the actual text that we're going to use that the next step is to probably remove these guides here. There they are. A little bit distracting is to go on Google if you want to include an image. So say you wanted to include the Overwatch logo. So you go, you go to Google Overwatch logo. There's two ways of doing this. Go to Google images. If there's a transparent background and there's black in the image, you're gonna want to save it. But if there's no black, you could just copy it straight like this, going to photo shop. So get right click, copy image or just press control. See going to photo Shop Control and Visa pace that go to your magic wand tool. And if you don't have this selected right click and it'll show these two tool options, go to Magic Wand and then select the black, then press delete on your keyboard or backspace and there's more black downstairs. We just have to do that multiple times. Or alternatively, we can press shift while we're selecting, and it will select to different to different selections at the same time. And there's backspace or delete, and then we have the Overwatch logo. Now I want this part to be white, and I know the Overwatch logo has this white in one of the variation, so I'm just gonna go use them. The magic once will again select this control you or command. You opened the hue slash saturation panel change the lightness all the way to 100. And now we have over watch local white. I'm gonna press control or command t again on my keyboard holding Ault dragged down And now we have the Overwatch logo in our thumbnail and I'm going to select this year with the rectangular marquee tool following the same principle at the very start of the video, when we have something selected and we want center it with that thing, all we have to do is go to the move tool and while a layer that We want to move its selected in the layers panel, press these two buttons, and I'm actually not going to center it horizontally with that. I'm gonna move it out, but it's centered it vertically, and that's what I really wanted. So that is that Now we have the Overwatch logo. The last step that actually want to do is I want to center this top text with the Overwatch logo and the letter a letter. Five. The number five very used to do. Just follow the same exact thing I did. Rectangular marquee tool. Select from the edges of one object. The edges of the other move tool With that layer is selected. Press the move key here. That's not Layer I wanted with top selected Press. The move key. And now it's centered with the Overwatch logo and number five, The last step that I want to do his name this and then create group So holding shift in the Layers panel Go all the way down here. Click control or command G on your keyboard. It'll create a group, and then we'll just name this group text, and now we have everything in a group together and then I'm gonna center it again one last time. So I'm gonna press control a or command A to select the main document, go back to the move tool and center it. Ah, horizontally and vertically. So that is how you create text for your thumbnails. And the next module, I'm gonna be going over exactly how to create some cool effects for both the text and the background to really make the thumbnail pop. I will see you inside.
5. Applying Effects: Okay, so now we're going to apply some really interesting effects that's going to make the thumbnail pop on screen right now, you're seeing basically a finished version of the thumbnail. I might add a little bit of text underneath that are some affect, sir. You know, maybe a logo in the top corner if I was branding this for my personal channel. But this is basically the gist of what it's going to look like. I'm gonna be breaking down each individual effect from here. So let me turn this off. And this is actually where we left off the last time with just the text in the background and the very first thing that we're going to go and do because gonna choose this late here and create another layer on top of it. So on top of the backing and they go to our brush tool here on the left hand side of the screen. Just select that, make sure your hardness is all the way at zero and make sure the brush size is relatively large, and then make sure you have black selected as your foreground color. And then what we're going to do is we're gonna zoom out here a little bit holding Ault and then using the scroll wheel on. And then I'm gonna go around the edges of the document just like this to create a nice shadow behind the main image. Just like that. Very simple to do. But it creates a lot of depth, and I like the effects. So I do that on a lot of my thumbnails were just gonna rename this layer to shadow. Now, on top of the shadow layer, we're gonna create another layer here. We're gonna change the color from black toe white. And then what we're going to do is we're gonna go to the very top with the same brush settings again, hardness at zero size somewhere around 900. And what is gonna make it to right about here? And you can kind of copy what I'm doing and then just click once and adds a nice, bright light at the very top and add some death through the image. We're just gonna rename this layer light cool. And after that, I'm gonna add a few interesting effect. So as we can see with this image here, there is a border And then there's also some lines adding a little bit of detail to it. I just thought it was something cool. Throw in and will do that now. So in order to get the border, we're gonna double clip to open the layers style panel on the back in here. They won't want to go to stroke and already have a preset. So you can copy these settings here on the layer styles panel. But you want to make sure that the position is inside and the color is black. Now, if you wanted to do a white order, you could do that as well and put it on top of the shadow. Somehow, if you want to play around with that or you could do like a different color like red purple , whatever. But I like black. I feel like it adds a nice effect to the edges of the document. So we're gonna select that click, OK, and then we're gonna create another layer on top of the light layer. We're gonna go to the polygonal polygonal public. My used to call this in the polygonal, and it's kind of stuck in my head, but it's the political lasso tool. And then we're that's gonna click here at the very top hold shift on our keyboard. So that creates a 90 degree angle. Click here, click here and then come back around still holding shift and then connect the edges like that and then making sure the black is on the background color. We're gonna press control, backspace or command backspace. If you're on Mac and it will create a nice black line here, we're gonna do the same thing on the bottom, right? We're gonna do the same thing we just did and connect that control backspace. After that, we're gonna double click, go to the blending mode again, change it from normal overlay and then change the opacity down a little bit, too. Maybe, like, I don't know, 40%. That seems pretty good. And, you know, maybe we could throw an inner glow on marriages for a little bit of added detail. You can see here if we zoom in, we turn off the inner glow. The edges of it don't quite look the same. Not a massive detail, but I don't know. I just like to be extra sometimes. So that's that. We're just gonna name this FX one just because And now the next thing we're going to do is gonna add some effects to the text to make it stand out a little bit more. So what I'm gonna do is one to choose this group here that we made. I'm gonna hold Ault on my keyboard and drag up. Or alternatively, you could just press control, slash command J and that will duplicate it. But we're gonna turn this background text layer off here, and then we're gonna right click and go to Merge Group. So that's gonna give less an actual layer toe work with you. And after we do that, we want to press control or command on our keyboard and then click the image on the layer style or on the layers panel here. So again, control, slash command and then click on the thumbnails. Go to select, modify, expand, and then this will pop up on your screen. I'm gonna do about 30 pixels. Click, OK, and then I'm gonna create another layer on the layer. Uh, layer tapped dry, get underneath the text layer, press control in backspace or commanded backspace, and it'll fill that outline with black. Now, as you can see, there's some spots in between here that we want to fill up so we can just use the plague. No lasso tool. Go around these spots, Click around control backspace. Same thing with this one down here, throwback space. And then all of these little spots here, troll, backspace. And you couldn't touch up the edges as well, if you want to. You know, like if you wanted toe get rid of this part here, you could just drag it across control, backspace. But I'm not gonna do that. It's gonna leave it as is just to give it a bit more of it. Interesting design helmet. But then we're going to double click here on the layer that we just made. Go to Grady and overlay. And then, you know, you could choose whatever great you really want. I like to use a dark greedy in here, so I'm gonna use this one, and I'm gonna toggle the reverse so that it shows this way like a lighter color at the top . Or alternatively, go in here to the Grady in and swap these around if you really wanted to, but I'm not gonna do that. I'm just gonna talk of the rivers, and then I'm gonna add a stroke to it, making sure that this time it's on the outside and I'm gonna change the color from black to white and then change the size down just a little bit like stuff. There we go. All right. And then on top of that, what we're going to dio is we're going Teoh, add some drop shadow to the text. You can copy these exact settings here in the drop shadow panel. Click. Okay. And then I'm going to use the rectangular mark A tool to select. You could have done this earlier. Like before we rast arise the text layer. You could have done this, but I'm just gonna do this specifically right now when you use the rectangular mark, a tool to select the letter here or not, the letter of the number control J two duplicated on the layer and then go in and change to the grating overlay. And I'm going to choose like, uh uh, this color right here and it matches. The Overwatch will go over here and actually gonna remove the drop shadow because it supplied on the layer below it. So not a big deal. And then I'm gonna merge these two layers by selecting this in the layer styles panel holding shift and then selecting the text below it. Right click merged layers. And that is essentially how you do that A lot. A little bit of drop shots from Maine border here. Uh, actually, let me let me actually merge these two layers here. So we're going to do the same thing over and hold shift and then merge these layers here and they add some drop shadow underneath that, like, so cool. Now, the next thing we want to do is add some color correction, so I will see you in the next module.
6. Color Correction : All right. So now we have all of the text and the backing done the next step and the final step is to really just add some color correction to make this pop a little bit more. I'm as you can see, I added a couple color correction effects to make it stand out a lot in the finished product. So what I'm going to do, the first thing I'm going to do is I'm gonna go to these adjustments here at the bottom, click them and then I'm going to go to color balance, and you can play around with these and figure out what you like the best. But for this purpose, I'm just going to drag it to sigh on a little bit, maybe a little bit of magenta and then tad of a whole lot. And I'm gonna go to the adjustments tab here at the bottom goto vibrance and then turn the vibrance up a little bit as well. Maybe plus 20. And this all of a sudden looks a whole lot cooler than I did before my pain to turn that off. And it's just not even the same. It's a little bit more purple than pink or red. But I think it adds a little bit more flair to it. And as we can see, this one is a lot brighter than the bottom one right here, the one that we're making. So the next thing we need to do is go to the adjustments panel again and go to exposure. We want to turn up the exposure just a little bit like maybe 9.90 point 89 something like that. And then you can play around with these other ones if you want, but I'm just gonna leave them at zero for the purposes of this and now, with all of these effects combined on top, actually return the exposure down, maybe 56 something like that. A little bit. Yeah, with all of those effects combined, looks relatively similar. Obviously, these bars here a little bit smaller, but you can also go and do what a lot of designers do is. They download color correction packs from individual designers or design companies, and essentially, what you could do. You could drag those color corrections into your photo shop layer that you're using and apply them over the entire document. So I'm gonna go grab color correction and show you exactly how that's done. Okay, so I've gone on a grab some color correction for one of the packs that I had. This is one of those faze clan color correction packs that was released a few years ago. And I still use it to this day because some of the color corrections in this package is phenomenal. But you want to open the color corrections layer and then kind of go through them each individually and see which ones you like. Some of them aren't going to fit with exactly what you want, but you can just go down and see which ones you like. Some of them were gonna work. Some of them are gonna look cool. Like this one looks pretty cool. And so I'm gonna mark that with color here. Some of these don't look as cool. Some of them don't fit properly. But other ones look actually really interesting. And you want to go through, you want to play with them. So this one kind of turns into a black and white effect on this one. Just that's more color. Very interesting. I just go through and choose which one you like. My heart's pretty already much already set on the one that I chose before. However, this looks really cool, too. Yeah, I'm gonna go choose this one cc 21. But leave the rest of these guys. Yes, Krypton contents. I don't turn the cc on. Maybe turn the opacity down on that like maybe 50. And the color correction could really add some flair. There are also other ways to do this. Like you could install some plug ins on Photoshopped that could do this for you, where you can get packs or you can just do it manually yourself, the adjustments, but color correction is a pretty big part of making something stand out after you've finished everything else you wanna layer that on top of everything to add a bit mawr contrast, flair and overall likability to the thumbnail, and that's basically it. The final step is going to be saving it properly. And we will get to that in the next module
7. Saving Your Design: The truth is one saving thumbnails and designs like this. There are multiple ways to save it, and unless you're an artist or graphic designer, it's not gonna make that much of a difference to save it as a J peg compared to a P and G 24. But the way I like to do it the way I like to present it on, like for my portfolio in the past and the way it truly does look, the best is if you do it this way, that I'm about to show you. So instead of just doing it the conventional way going file safe. What you want to do is you want to goto file export, save for Web legacy or alternatively, if you want to do that crazy keyboard command, you could do that as well. But then this should pop up on your screen. It may take a second to load, depending on how fast your computer is, and it brings up this window. Now you want to copy the settings that I have here. If you don't have the image size correctly, it should do this automatically. It should link it to the aspect ratio but just copy these settings here like if you could have 1920 by 10 80 it would be the exact same thing. But you should be using 12 video by 7 24 thumbnails specifically, as I mentioned in the previous module, you want to make sure that it's PNG 24 not PNG eight. Not JPEG PNG 24. Making sure the metadata is on none. That's very important as well, and then going to click saved. Once you have the rest of these settings all put up and you want to say that to your desktop, you want to say that to a place on your computer where you can find it, and that is essentially how you save thumbnails properly in photo shop.
Jhori Remington, Lord of Ads
