How to make a Thumbnail

1. Intro: Hello and welcome to the course. I'll be your teacher throughout this learning you guys about how to make thumbnails. Thumbnails are one of the most important things because it's the first thing someone sees before they decide to click on your video is what makes the difference between a video that gets 20 views and one that gets 20 thousand views. So in this course, I'm going to show you guys everything I've learned while making thumbnails and everything that you guys need to know this course is for those people that don't really have an idea on how thumbnails are made and the science that goes behind making them. Or just if you don't know much about Photoshop, this will be very valuable for you as well. There's plenty of things here you can pick up if you want to start learning Photoshop, or if you just want to further improve yourself. If you're feeling like your thumbnails aren't really stacking it up to other creators thumbnails. Or maybe you feel like they do, but you feel like they could even get better than this course will help you with that. There are a few tips and tricks in this video that a few people actually know about, which will give you an upper hand. If you give me your attention and follow this course, you're going to learn a couple of specific things. The first one being backgrounds, how to find backgrounds for your thumbnails and how to tweak them to make them even better. It will also learn the best way to create glow around objects or characters and which settings, settings I use when I do. Lastly, you will learn the best way to use Camera Raw Filter and which settings and are worth using. So, yeah, thank you for listening to this intro. Now, let's get started with the first lesson. 2. How to make a thumbnail in photoshop: Guys, and now we've got just tangy row and two backgrounds. Now. Those are the brightness is there. Yeah, okay. So the background actually comes from somebody else's them. Now you can see this is Afro. Send you a thumbnail right here. And pretty much I just took, just really liked the background here, the flames. So I mean, instead of just looking for like flames or fire online, I thought this will work. So I basically just this crop that out, maybe a bit more properly. And then I actually, I guess one thing you can do is you can go here on any one of these and click Select Subjects. And yeah, it's basically just gonna do it for you. Not quite accurately, but you can, you can pretty much just do the rest yourself like that. And for the background anyway, like I said in the video, you really don't need to be super accurate when you're cropping it out. Yeah. Now we've got or I guess on let me just select this part because I only need the one on the right. Yeah. Okay. So now we can pretty much just delete that. And yeah. Now we have this thing right here. And as you can see, I pretty much just flipped it and placed it here. Although you can see that it doesn't quite fit, it's because I had to tweak it quite a bit for it to like match. Because obviously, if I just put it here, this area right here isn't really getting filled. So what I did is I just, you can see here or weight gain a way that's even more background stuff. Where's the actual as any of these the background oh, no, wait. I'm sorry. Okay. So yeah, as you can see, we've got this here and then we duplicated it, some other stuff and kind of I think it's these two yeah. Kinda put them on top here just so it would look nicely. And also I made sure to like if you remove these or I just made sure that the lighter part was near his face and then the further out you go, the darker it is. I just think that works better. So I basically just use the same background on the thing on the right. I just changed the colors and stuff. Was either this one or no. It's I guess at least yeah, this one right here is actually not as actually not from that image. This is actually something different entirely here. I actually did get some water because I want it to look a bit more like water and not fires and that's what it's supposed to be. But aside from that, I just kinda did the same as this side and just change the color to blue. And then I made the glow and everything. And so I had, I was kind of difficult because I wanted to write glow here or a blue glow on the right and then red glow, orange flaming glow on the left. So pretty much just I had to make two different versions of thing. You can see here. I had if I disabled this, this is just that part of the face, whereas this is just that part. And then I guess I have like the middle one here, which doesn't really do anything except for B in the middle so that this glow isn't visible here. Um, and the effects that we do got on here is inner glow or Inner Shadow, inner glow and then drop shadow and all are on. Let's see. This is linear dodge add this screen and then this is the urine dodge add as well. And they're all the same color. And it's the same for this one, just living in color. So then I added some, um, I guess or I don't know if the guy ended up using that. Then some color balance just to make it a bit more. Because this is a bit like, like this. So I just put that onto matched and this right here a little bit. I guess this could have also worked, but I just didn't want it to be too much. And then I also added some brightness layers to, let's see here. I think. Yeah, I added some brightness levels to all of them. Are just as entire face because I think these actually gotten that messed up on supposed to be clipping masks. Yeah, there we go. Just so he was a bit more visible because before, you know, as a bit dark, especially compared to the background, you don't really want to have the main object. Darker than the background most of the times anyway. So yeah, that's that. And then I made some let's see. I've got like in the video, I've got some actual glow just on the background here, and then the same here or I don't know if you can really see it that well, maybe maybe not. But oh no, I think it's okay. This is actually just what I use to make it blue. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Also I have this effect to make it a bit more like to get the sparks there. Let me turn it on all the way. Yeah, there we go. So it's kinda like the red sparks are here whereas the blue ones are here. I don't remember if I use yeah. Okay. And then we got even more blue here. And I think that's that in terms of oh, yeah, no. And then the color balance the color brown balanced here too. I mean, just looking at how much better the hair looks with the color balance. Saying, I mean, one thing is you don't want the character to blend in with the background. So you wanna be a bit careful on how much glow you really have on here. Like you can see, this is really blending in with the backgrounds. You wouldn't be a bit careful with that even though, because sometimes the image will look better, but the thumbnails job with pretty much is just to attract viewers. So just keep that in mind. There's really no right answer there. So yeah, that's that. And then we I mean, I wanted to have yeah, I put I put it on the camera raw filter is and I'll show you in a second which settings I use for that. I put on. I hadn't like this at first but then I was like, Okay, that's a bit, I want it to be even brighter because it is a little bit dark. So I turned the exposure up and I'll show you guys exactly which settings they use. Okay, So exposure, that's just for this one. You don't always need an exposure, but the texture always having a 100 and then the clarity really just depends. I don't think I've ever turn it down. Yeah. Now, probably not, but a lot of times it does work to put it to put it up a bit. With this one, it doesn't really just case-by-case basis, but you can see here that I did put it up a little bit and I do think that helped. So then we've also got some Dehaze. This windows were worked pretty well. It just kind of gives it some levels, I suppose. Then the vibrance up a bit. I actually didn't even put on the saturation that all of this one, which normally you should always do, but maybe I can even do more vibrance. I don't know, or just saturation. Let's see here. Let's look at the before and yeah, that actually, yeah. Okay. So I think maybe actually I forgot to put up the saturation. Yeah. Okay. Well, that looks even better. So yeah. Keep saturation as well. Let me just pull this back up. Yep. Alright. So yeah, vibrance saturation. I don't really remember if I had anything here, but you can put on sharpening, but a lot of times it will just, it won't look all that great. It'll just look more like pixelated and it won't really work. So for the most part, I don't really mess with that one too much. The Color Mixer can be pretty interesting. You've got so many different options here. And this really just is the further away you get the colors that you want properly shown. So the reds are definitely, but, well, yeah, I guess this is more the hue, which normally you just changed a little bit like that. You can see it just changed a little bit. So do I want to more like a reddish or do I want it, the red is more orange and same with the orange. Those are red and then this side is more like yellow. I didn't really do anything for this image though. We got the saturation. This one can be nice to use. Although I mean, yeah, it's pretty much already like Max saturated so you don't really need on this one. What about the blues? Yeah, you can. But you can see it gets, if anything, it just gets darker I, instead of more saturated. So it really just depends. There's also luminance. I'm really, I just suggest you tweak these just a little bit, you know, just kinda test them out. Like for example, the purples, I think maybe that looks a bit better, but it really just, you have to just test a little bit and just go back and forth. So yeah, that was the Color Mixer and then there's color grading here. You can actually do a bit of stuff if you Let's see here, yeah, the mid tones. Again, you can kinda see the colors are just a lot more brighter there. So let's say I maybe did like this level. It's just test allocates. That doesn't really, actually does work a little bit to be fair. You can see like this compared to, this looks like way darker in this lot brighter. But what you don't want to do is make it, make the colors washed out like it did now, a little bit, a little bit. Sometimes when you increase like just the normal brightness, brightness adjustment layer here, it becomes just instead of bright edges becomes just kinda washes out the colors. So you wanna make sure you don't do that. And then we've got don't really use that one. Now. This one either. I mean, I pretty much don't want to have grain for thumbnails ever. Calibration. I mean, is there again, it's kinda similar to the color mixer. You can tweak a little bit here and there. You can actually say that that ended up better or a lot of it is just how you, It's just a lot of it and the smart filters is testing, but for sure, the settings that are in the basic tab here are the most important one, especially texture, clarity and dehaze. If you combine them with texture just a little bit. It'll be really good at vibrance and saturation. You should always use especially saturation. Yes, sometimes it can be good to create just like an S curve here, but you don't want to really have it too much. You see the, the the tones are just going kinda crazy there. Yeah. I mean, this one, I don't really think I need one because I think there's already quite a difference between the brightest and the darkest here. See, yeah, that's pretty much it. If you want to, again, like I said, if you want this effect right here or here, um, let me see just which one is on us because I have these activated. Yeah. So like this one, if you want to, if you want to get the effects like this. There'll be a link somewhere. This is my first course, but there'll be somewhere. You can find them on the course end. Yeah, there'll be those. Yeah, Again, just look at the difference between those two. That's how much Camera Raw Filter really, really helps you, you know, because that is like a massive glaube do that is like insane. Then I also have this title here. I'm a bit unsure if I want this as the final thumbnail or if I just want to use this just because this is the thumbnail for this game right here. So sometimes they can help having, if you're making a gaming thumbnail to actually have HUD elements here to show your audience that it's actually, you know, you're playing the game and this is not talking about this show or whatever, because this guy is not a screenshot from the game, he's a screenshot from the show. But it really just depends. Sometimes this, this could work on its own or sometimes you need a slight indicator for if it's the game or not. And I think that's pretty much it for this video. There'll be more courses in the future for sure. But for now this is the first one, and I'll see you guys in the next course.