YouTube Thumbnail Design Made Easy: Beginner’s Canva Tutorial for Free & Clickable Designs

1. Welcome to Class: Designing YouTube thumbnails and Canva is fantastic. The software is great and it's free and welcome to this class on designing clickable YouTube thumbnails in Canvas. By the end of this course, you'll not only be able to design custom thumbnails online, but you'll also know what thumbnail style to target for your videos. My name is Carol and I'll be your guide. I'm a YouTuber and create my own YouTube thumbnails on Canvas. And I'm excited to show you the tips and tricks I use so you can make better design. We'll cover how click-through rate is a matter of teamwork between your thumbnail and your video's title 11, essential to effective thumbnails. The difference between targeting search traffic and suggested traffic. A quick camera run through six common thumbnail styles used on YouTube, which will be the bulk of our course, and a free bonus app to enhance your photos. So if you're looking for a free been effective option for YouTube thumbnails, then this course is for you. Oh, and make sure you don't skip the first few videos because they include information essential to understanding how thumbnails work on YouTube. Okay, see you for our first lesson. Coming right up. 2. CTR is a Matter of Teamwork (Titles and Thumbnails): Clearly you can see that thumbnails are important for getting views on YouTube. And clearly you're in this class to see how to use Canva to create your thumbnails. Gray Canva is fantastic and you will soon see why. I'm going to show you how to make six distinct types of thumbnails commonly used. But before we get right into designing these thumbnails, you want to clearly understand what click-through rate is also referred to as CTR. Ctr is one of the top metrics to focus on. Simply put, it's the number of people who click on your video when they see it appear on YouTube. For example, if your video is shown or it has impressions of 1 thousand people and a 100 people click on your video, then in essence you have a 10% click-through rate. And that's pretty good. Increasing your CTR isn't just about thumbnails. Actually. It's how well your thumbnails work with their titles. And it's crucial that you get your thumbnails and titles to work as a team to many YouTubers make the mistake of using the same content and the thumbnail as they do in the title. Don't do this. It's a waste of valuable real estate. Let me explain. Let's say that your title is top five pizzas. You can make it home. You do not want to use any of the words or expressions and your thumbnail that you've already used in your title. Instead of using something like top five pizzas in the thumbnail, use no text at all or texts that is different from the title. For example, ready in one hour. Keep this rule in mind as we go throughout making our own thumbnails in this course. And check your own videos on YouTube to see if you're making the same amateur mistake. Oh, it real quick. Let's go ahead and look at YouTube Analytics to where you can find your own videos. Ctr, simply go into your YouTube studio right here. Didn't go down to analytics. Once you're in analytics, come up here to the top menu and click on content. And then you'll see your average click-through rate right here. If you've been looking at your videos, Average CTR rate, you're kind of making a mistake as well. The average CTR is not a true representation of how well your video is performing. And I'll show you why when we get to lesson number four. But before we go there, let's go to lesson number three and take a look at the 11th essentials to making effective YouTube thumbnails. See you there. 3. 11 Essentials to Effective Thumbnails: Almost all successful thumbnails share certain traits that entice viewers to click on them. So let's quickly go over 11 of these traits. And it isn't a requirement to have all 11 into your thumbnails. But you do want to try and use as many as possible when appropriate. And as we design our thumbnails in this course, we'll refer back to these 11 essentials. I've also included a downloadable PDF that can serve as a helpful checklist. So be sure to check it out. Number one, keep it simple with thumbnails quite often, less is more. The viewer is probably only going to see your thumbnail for a fraction of a second. Make sure that it's clear. Because if the design is too busy, it's likely that the viewer will look elsewhere. So you want to keep things simple enough that your message can be processed immediately. Use emotion. A lot of YouTubers these days we make faces videos, and that's fine. And there isn't really enough data to say whether or not using a face or not a thumbnail makes much of a difference. What does make a difference is if you have some degree of emotion in your thumbnail, but if you're using your face, It's usually best to do it with matching emotion. Our minds pick up on those emotional cues quickly and those cues can be powerful. No video stills, do not take video stills. What that means is you've recorded your video and then you take a snapshot of a frame of that video. That's not a good idea. Why? Because the video is of lower quality when put into a photo format, instead, take photographs, you'll end up with much better images and viewers will see that difference. Limit text. Texts on the thumbnail certainly isn't required. However, if using text make it a maximum of three to four words. Because again, you want your viewer to immediately understand your message text on the left. Since we've typically read from left to right, placing texts on the left is a good option. However, this isn't a requirement. Certainly there are times where you could put text in the center or even on the right. It's a judgment call and it depends on really what your thumbnails trying to convey. Clear font. Most people will be viewing YouTube on their phones. So the text needs to be large enough and clear enough to easily read. Don't use fancy fonts because they can be potentially confusing. Instead, use thicker, bolder font. Try to go with a Sans font as opposed to a serif font as well. Contrasting colors, contrast in colors, make things pop. There's a reason that you've probably seen YouTubers and content creator like myself using a blue background because it contrasts with the skin tones. Most skin tones, at least to see what colors contrast with your designs, you can simply type color wheel into Canva and use one of these color wheels to decide. Use the center evidence suggests that thumbnail is performed better when the item of interests is closer toward the center of the thumbnail. This makes the message more balanced and clear to the viewer. But again, you don't need to follow this technique every time draw attention. It's a common ineffective technique to use outlines, a glow, arrows, boxes, and circles to draw the viewer's attention to a specific area of the design. Just don't overuse it. Avoid this area, avoid putting important areas of information at the bottom right of your thumbnail because YouTube will cover that spot with the time duration of your video. Tell a story. People are naturally drawn to stories. And I'm sure you've heard the saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. This will depend on your topic, but consider trying to tell a story in one way or another in your design itself. Perhaps a before and after for an action shot will do. And keep an eye out for storytelling thumbnails on YouTube because you can incorporate others techniques into your own designs. Now that you know a few effective techniques for thumbnail design, you need to decide if your video is either going to target search traffic or suggested tropic, if you're not sure what that means, make sure you don't skip the next video. See you there. 4. SEARCH vs SUGGESTED: Youtube is often referred to as using an algorithm, aka the algorithm, which is designed to help viewers find videos they want to watch and maximize long-term view or satisfaction. People usually refer to it in the singular form as if it's some one singular piece of software overseeing everything. This isn't true. Youtube has several algorithms, such as ranking videos in search, placing them on your homepage, having them pop up for what's next after viewing the video. And more, for simplicity sake and efficiency, we're going to categorize these algorithms into two different distinct camps. One is search and the other is suggested. And you'll want to consider which of these you'll want to target when designing your thumbnails. Interestingly, videos that performed well in search tend to perform poorly in suggested and vice versa. Search. Search is what it sounds like when someone is looking for a specific answer to a specific question, people will search that answer and a list of videos we'll populate. After all, YouTube is a search engine. As a general rule of thumb for search targeted thumbnails, you want to make sure that your designs are really obvious. That way a viewer immediately knows that your video is what they're looking for suggested. On the other hand, YouTube is also a platform for entertainment. Instead of searching for videos, YouTube also recommends or suggests videos on your homepage and elsewhere on the platform that Italy's would entertain you as a general rule of thumb for a suggested targeted thumbnails, we want to use curiosity triggers that generate feelings of amazement, mystery, and FOMO, the fear of missing out. We're about to design six different thumbnails for six different types of videos. Comment on YouTube. The first three will target search algorithms. In the last three will target suggested algorithms. But before we go there, you may find this next point interesting regarding your own videos click-through rate. So let's take a quick look at YouTube video analytics. Once we're back in video analytics, go ahead and go on the left and click on content. I want to look at a particular video that I have targeted for search. And if I go into that particular video analytics by clicking right here. And then if we go up to reach, we're going to see the click-through rate on average that I have and it's 5.1. In 5.1 for me, I would consider a bit low, but remember, I'm targeting search traffic. So to get a better indicator on the actual performance, what you'll wanna do is go down here, click on Seymour, and then up here, traffic source. In here, all the different traffic sources. And they're each going to have their own impressions click-through rate. And this is really interesting. So what I'm going to do is just click on what I've targeted YouTube search. Instead of 5.1, we can come over here and see that the video is actually performing quite well for surge 11 for as far as our other categories suggested, it's a little confusing because we do have a suggested videos option, but we're really lumping a few of these together. Suggested videos mostly, and browse. Suggested videos are those that are on the right side of your page after you've watched a particular video and browses your homepage, just a different word. Both of these are, we're, YouTube is actively suggesting for recommending your content. Now if I look at these two, the click-through rates are a little bit smaller, 4.82.4, but this will give you a better indicator of how you're performing compared to suggested and search. So keep in mind when we go back here to our average click-through rate. Be careful of using this number for how well your video is actually performing. Okay, it's time to jump into Canva. See you there. 5. Canva Quick Run-Through: So the first thing you wanna do when you get onto canva.com is get your design canvas laid out. I suggest coming up here and click on Create a design. Customize your size and make it just as I've done so many times before 1920 by 1080, you can type in those numbers here. 1920 by 1080 pixels, make sure it's pixels, nothing else. Then you've got your Canvas. Just so everyone's clear, right here in the center is your canvas. This is where you will be making your design. Over here on the left, we have several things, not all of them you'll use, but a lot of them will come in handy at the top, our templates, cheers, for example, when we go into something like a versus type of thumbnail, you can type that in and you have some templates that can either give you inspiration or you can use them for your actual thumbnails. It's up to you and there's a lot of things that you can do. So this is an area to play around. What really does come in handy quite often is right here and elements. This is where you're going to be using certain things like shapes, Let's say for example, arrows. Or just about any other item you can think of. Just type it up here and you should get some pretty interesting results. Next or uploads. Notice I have a few of my own already up here. This is where you're going to upload any images that you've either taken yourself or you've downloaded elsewhere. And you can put them on here and manipulate them here on your Canvas. Next is text. There are all kinds of texts you can put just by clicking here, you can put text on your Canvas. And if you come up here, you have so many almost endless number of fonts to choose from. And since we're already here, Let's just tell you about this top bar here, your top menu here, depending on what you've clicked on, you have a lot of options for manipulating and adjusting that particular item that you've clicked on it. So I have texts at the moment. If I go back up to elements, let's say I click on arrows. I choose this particular arrow. Notice it's not showing up because it's white. Let me click on this down. Here we go. So it's here I can change the color and have other options as well. There's so much stuff that you're going to see pretty soon as we go throughout our actual design edits, then we have photos. There's a lot of stock photography that you can use. It's already here perfectly fine for your thumbnails. I do sometimes. Then there are other things like styles, audio and video that you won't really need to use for your thumbnails and several other things as we scroll down that we might get into a little bit later. So we have a large amount of options on the left menu, we have options that are here at the top, and we also have something toward the bottom. You can manipulate the size of your canvas here. You can add new pages. Here. Something that comes in handy quite a bit. Let's say I'm going to take an old thumbnail. I'll scroll up and grab one from my uploads. This is an actual thumbnail I've used before, but it's in photo format at the moment. And what you wanna do to make sure things look good is scroll down all the way to ten. And if it looks okay, it's such a small size here, it'll probably look okay on someone's phone when they're looking at your YouTube videos or your YouTube thumbnails on their phones. And I want to leave you with one bit of advice. I suggest coming up here. This is where we can add a title to this particular file. Give it a name, something like Canva thumbnails. And make this your default area to where you can go and create future designs. So you'll have a history of what you've made. And that history will help you make current and future thumbnails because you can draw upon some of the effects that you've put in past thumbnails and apply them to other thumbnails that you'd like to create. Okay, I think we're ready to get into thumbnail design. Number one, coming right up. 6. The “How to” Thumbnail: How to thumbnail titles to these videos generally begin with the words how to in the title, people are often looking for solutions to problems using this format on YouTube. So let's start with our first thumbnail. And one of the first things I'd like you to do is here on our Canvas, look down here where we have the option to add a page. When we do that, if you'll notice right up here above the canvas at the very top left there isn't anything. But when we click an extra page, now we have the option of giving titles to each of these pages. And this is going to come in handy for the actual titles that we expect to have for our videos. So I'm going to add a title which will help us have a clear understanding of what to put on our thumbnail. It's how to make the perfect pizza dough at home. And you're going to see that we're going to have a theme and they're all be pizza base. So let's assume that we have some sort of pizza based YouTube channel. So the first thing that I think we're going to have as the star of our show is another than pizza dough. So let's see if we can find pizza dough. If this is a great opportunity when you have your own photos and you can upload those photos right here by clicking Upload Media. You have several options, but usually it's probably just from your computer. But for demonstration purposes, I'm going to go down here. I've already got them here. But what I would do is I would just type in pizza dough roll. And one of them that pops up right here. And I like this one, especially because it has a clear background that really comes in handy. This is gonna be the star of our show right here. Now, we want it somewhere centralized, somewhere near the center, doesn't have to be in the very middle. But somewhere in the center, I'm going to say right about here. We'll play with it a little bit and we can always tweak it. Now behind that, I'm going to put it on let's say I spelled this wrong. Anyway, it still worked. I want to put in, let's say a plate. Now, earlier I found this red one. I think that the red is a little striking behind the pizza dough. And red is known as a color that sort of gets people hungry. That's one of the reasons we see red in McDonald's. So let's size these together to where they make sense. And notice this plate is on top of our pizza dough. In order to change that, all we need to do is click on one or the other, doesn't really matter. I'm going to click on plate. I'm going to come up here. You don't position. I'm going to move it backward. And there we go. Yellow shadowing going on. So let's make this look somewhat delicious, interesting and realistic. At the same time, I'm going to make it a little bit lower. You can change the angles right here as well. So I'm going to put it right about here. I think this will, this will work for our demonstration purposes. Now, when I move things around here, I don't want them to be moving off one way and the plate moving as well in a different way are staying safe, staying in the same place. So what I'm going to do is if I like this right here, I don't want to change it. What I can do is just highlight both of these. Come up here and click Group. And then the next thing you know, you can play with it like this and you didn't resize it. So that really comes in handy. So we want the star of the show to sort of, let's just say it's going to be in here for now. Now, let's think about our background. I'm going to go into photos again. And I'm going to type in restaurant. And I want some sort of bright. And it's going to be a little, maybe a little blurry in the background. I like this. I'm going to click on this. And I'm going to resize it to where it takes up the entire canvas. And when you do that and you let it go, it's going to attach itself to the background. So I'm going to click here, and it's automatically attached itself to the background. This can be good or bad. It depends on what you're doing. But if you want to, to detach it, just simply right-click and you can click detach image and go from there. So I'm gonna go back and I wanted to get it right about, let's say here, this will do for now. So I'm going to click, it's, it's put itself in the back. And let's make this look somewhat realistic. Let's say I'm going to make this really up close and I'm gonna give it a bit of a curve like that, which is put this right here. I'm going to move on. I'm going to make our background fit a little bit better because this table doesn't really match that well. I'm going to double-click and you can stretch things out a little bit as well. Let's just sort of make it take up the whole background. I'll click again. And that's looking a little bit better. Okay? So I wanted to also take a picture of me. Now this is up to you. If you want to be in the baton, in the photo and the thumbnail or not, but faces do help sometimes. So I'm going to put myself in there. I'm going to click on some of my past up loads, scroll through some of the images I have. And let's come or so here's some photos I've taken specifically for thumbnails. I'm going to take Let's go down to this one right here. Click on it. Now, with the paid version was fantastic. If you have the paid version of Canva, you can just click on the photo, come up here to Edit Image and then remove background. Fantastic. I love this function so much. That's one of the reasons I pay for the service. But if you don't have a paid account on camera, that's okay. If you have a Mac, you can use Keynote. Or if you have Microsoft, you can go to PowerPoint. And in each of these programs, you can automatically remove the background with a few simple steps. All I would suggest you do is go to Google, type in how to remove background in and type in PowerPoint or Keynote. And you'll get the few easy steps to make that happen. So I am going to put myself fairly large. And I want to flip this a little bit because I want my hand to point to the dough so we can click right here. We can flip horizontal. Easy enough. Again, I want to stretch this out. I'm gonna come down here and make the Canvas a little smaller so I can play with it. Stretch it out. And let's say something like this. And let's see what this looks like. If we put it toward the back, I'm going to position it backward. But see that we sort of hidden the table here. Let me show you a little trick. We need some layering. Let's say this looks okay here. But I'm going to take our background image again, and I'm going to find that image again real quick so we don't have to play with anything. Let's go to photos restaurant there it is. I'm going to just move down here and crop things to where it's right about here. And make this larger. They put it right down here, let's say, and move it backwards as well as awkward. There we go. That looks okay. Now I want the star of the show to be the dough. So I want to blur myself out a little bit, and this is just a creative choice. So I'm going to come up to Edit image, adjust. And we have all of these options. What I'm going to do is blur just slightly so you can see me more or less, but it puts the focus or the focal point on the Dow. Alright, so far, so good, I like what we're working with. Now. Let's talk a little bit about shadowing. If we come back up to elements and we type in shadow, I love working with shadows. You have a few options. I'm going to choose. Let's say this one. We've got this shadow that we can always adjust. I want to give a bit of a shadow down here under this plate. So I'm going to move it a little bit like so. Increase it a little bit towards the right size. Sort of give it a little bit of shower, just a hint. And I'm going to move it backward. So we've got a bit of a shadow there. It looks a little more realistic. There's a little bit more depth. You can play around with it a little bit too. A movement. And you can use the up and down arrows, left and right arrows to help position things as well. Okay, so we've got some shadow here, right here between the table and mean the background. It looks a little bit odd. So I want to add some sort of a bit of a glow back here to sort of smooth things out. If I come up here and type in glow, we have several choices. I'm going to use this one right here. And I can stretch it out just a little bit and move it down a little bit more. Put it underneath towards right about here, and move it to the background. A little bit back. There we go. Now. That's okay. Move it a little. You can move it around where things look a little bit better. Next, let's put in some text. So we'll come up here. Now. Remember, we don't really want to use the texts that's in our title. So what I think we can do is put in something simple, how to make the perfect pizza dough at home in three steps. So let's do that. Let's type text. Let's click on Text, and it's up to you what font style you want. They're all different types. There's one that I've used before and I think it's a on PLN Anton. I can just type it in A&P Anton, their yard right there. And I instead of just typing in three steps, that's an option, but I'm going to separate the three and the steps so we can play around with size. So let's just take out steps. We can resize things either up here or just by dragging, which is fine. I'm going to put three. Let's give it. Let's make it the same color as our plates. It'll sort of stand out. Now, how can we do that? Let's go to color. And if we click right here and the plus area, and then we have this eyedropper. We can come over here and find a color. Let's go with this one here and voila, there you go. Okay. So let's bring this up to right about here. And I wanted to sort of overlap with the dough, just gives a little bit more depth. So I'm going to put it right about here, resize it just a little bit more. And I'm going to position it backwards. Next, I'll copy and then paste on your keyboard, resize a little bit. Let's type in steps. Move it around. Let's get it right about this. Looks good so far, but let's see. Remember, you're always going to want to play around with things where they look as best possible. Again, it's always a creative choice. This looks okay. Again, I'm going to position it backward. Alright, so we've got the star of our show really popping out, but our text isn't popping out that much. Now here's another trick you can do. You can either come up here and change the effects, change the colors. Let me show you two options. One is, let's say we want to give it an outline. We can copy and then paste and we have this other one on the top. Now, we can go to color. Let's say we want to give it a white outline and click on Effects and go to hello. Then we've got a white outline right here. I need to do is of course, reposition backwards. And there you go. There's, these are all creative choices. But what I wanna do today, instead of this, let's get rid of that. And let's just sort of make the background here a bit wider, a little bit of a glow so that these reddish colors pop out a little bit more. And we can use this glow that we had earlier. Let's copy and paste. And let's resize it a little bit too. It's a little bit larger. You can put, let's say right about here. And I'm going to copy this one as well for later. Let's position it backward or to the back. That'll work. And it sort of pops out a little bit more here. Let's do it again for our steps here. So we've copied and we pasted. Let's put it right about here. Let's position it to the back and it pops out a little bit more and you can always reposition things to where they look better for you. I'm gonna do this one more time because in the middle of the P, It's a little dark, so I'm going to copy paste or just click Paste. Go right about here, position to the back and look at that. It pops out, it looked pretty good. And this is one way to make a how to thumbnail that in essence follow the essentials we covered in our previous lesson. Okay, let's go on to our second thumbnail. 7. The Listical Thumbnail: With a listicle thumbnail. Videos for these thumbnails typically include a list anywhere from three to several items that are related to each other in some way. Furthermore, they are simple, cover several aspects of a topic and do it all in a short time. So our next type of thumbnail is what we call a listicle. And a listicle is like it says, it's a list. And it works well on YouTube, especially for growing channels and in search, of course. And it'll start something like we see here. Top seven, top five, top 20, some sort of superlative, like top, best, most, and so on with a number. And then continuing with our pizza theme, we're going to use this title, top seven best pizza places in New York. You should try. In our thumbnail, we're going to want to have something to do, of course, with pizza and New York. So my idea is to have someone biting a pizza or looking at a pizza. And we want something in the background that gives us a signal or a symbol of New York itself. So of course you can use your own photos, but I've found some stock photos and I've chosen one particularly right here. I like this photo because she has a very expressive face. We have a close-up image of pizza in a box, and it's large. So I'm going to enlarge it before it becomes part of the background. I don't want to do that yet. I'm going to click on edit image and remove background. Remember you have the option of doing this in the paid service here on Canva or elsewhere. Okay, and I think that looks pretty good. We've got that big expression, going to stretch it out a little bit. So it really takes up a lot of the image here. Let's make the Canvas a little smaller so we can play with it. Stretch it out all the way. Okay. I think that looks pretty good. Let's keep that there. And I'm going to come up here and I'm going to hit this lock button so nothing changes. The next thing I wanna do is put some sort of symbol of New York here in the background. So I'm going to come up here to elements. I'm going to just type in New York City or just New York City. What happens? We've got a Statue of Liberty. I think that'll be just fine. This one's free. So let's click on it and let's make it a little bit larger. We can always adjust things later as you know, that's a little too large, right about, let's say here for now. Okay, we're going to position that backward. Now let's put in a little bit of text. Now, earlier, we've, we're going to use the same font so we can click on this Copy, come back down here, then paste. I want to name this. Remember we don't want to use the same words. So I want to use, since we think of New York as the Big Apple, let's say the big slice. So I'm going to make this a little smaller. I'm going to use all caps this time. All capitalized. I'm going to copy it. I'm going to put slice down here. I want to align them right about here. Then I'm going to click Paste again. And I'm going to type in the word is big. I'm going to make it the same size as these two words here. And here's a little trick. Now, if we come over here to File and we come down to Show rulers and guides, then you have these molecules up here. I'll just turn it off for a moment. See it's disappeared. Come back, Show rulers and guides. And if you click at the top or on the left and drag, we've got a ruler and guide, and I'm going to align it right here with the, I'm going to do the same thing again at the bottom of slice, right about here. I think that'll do. And I'm going to adjust the size of this word big to where it just touches the top and the bottom. So things are aligned. And to get rid of these rulers and guides, we can just scroll back up or click on them and go all the way back up. And you can also move things around with the arrows. So I'm going to click on here and touched the left arrow, move it over to it looks just about right. Things look good and I think that looks good to me. Now, before we adjust the size, Let's adjust the color. Now I have another idea. I'm going to go over to photos. I've recently used. I typed in New York pizza and I got this image. So I'm going to click on this image, and I like this red. So here's a little trick for you. If you want to use, I think I might have mentioned this. We want to change your font color to a color that's in one of the images. I want to change it to this color here. I've got the image on the screen on my canvas. I'm going to then click on my font. Click on Color, scroll down, and I have it right here. Click on this red and it's changed. Now that's a good color, but I want to make it a little bit redder or brighter. So I'll scroll back up here. Touch on the add color and you can make it a little bit brighter. Clicking here, I'm gonna go with, let's say this red will do for now. So we no longer need this image. Click on it, delete. Now I want all the other colors to be the same. And click on here. Click on this one actually and use the same colors. Okay? Now, we want to adjust all of these together. I'm going to, I'll click once on here and they're going to. Then when I'm holding down the arrow button or the Return button, and click on all of these. And then group. Now they're all together. We can move them together, resize them together. You can also click Ungroup if you want to do the same loan again. Or you can just drag across and have them highlighted. Click Group, and the same thing happens. So let's say we're gonna make this, we still want it big and have it in the middle right about here. That looks good. Now, let's think about the background. I would like to put some sort of background in here. Just white isn't quite enough. What can we use that will symbolize New York? I found a stock image here. This will do. Click on it. And I'm going to adjust the size to where it's just as large. But I sort of liked this taxi. I want the taxi to sort of be in the background. When I think of New York, I think of taxis. I'm going to click on this, reposition it to the back. Now here's a little trick to make things contrast. What I'll do is click on edit image. I will take the saturation all the way down, so it's black and white. You could do the same thing in here by clicking on adjust. Notice the saturation is all the way down. I also want to blur a little bit as we've done before. So we take the focus away from the taxi. There's a psychological hint of it in the background, but we focused now on the woman's face, the text and the pizza. Okay, Not only that, our text here is not really popping. So let's make it pop. When I'm going to do is you can either come up here to elements, nothing selected, and go into shapes. Or a little trick to getting a square or a rectangle or a circle. You can just end here, click on r and you get a square, a rectangle. You can also click Sea Route, click on C, and you get a circle. That's for later reference. I'm going to delete the circle, keep the square. I'm going to make this white and make it to where it's big enough to look good in the background. Let's make it right about here. Pull it all the way over. We could go all the way back here and then position it all the way to the back, then forward. Once. There we go. Now I don't like the white here, I'm going to bring it back right here, so it's hidden. I sort of liked that because we've got this white, a contrast well, with the red and the text. And it sort of looks almost like this white bar is, white block is projecting white light onto the woman's face. Okay, now let's do one other thing. We have this whitespace right here, this little real estate. Let's sort of occupy that with an element. Let's come up here and type in pizza. What do we get? All kinds of options? Let's look for a free one. I like this one here. I'm going to click on this, bring it to the front position at two, all the way to the front. Make it a little bit smaller. Get it to where it's just in there, right? Almost looks like the pizza is dripping onto the Empire State Building. And I think that looks pretty good. Now if we zoom in a little bit, just to fix a small mistake that I have, we sort of cutoff this area here. So that doesn't look quite right. So what we can do again is use that circle click. See, I've got a circle. I want to make it the same color as it is here. Her shirt, same color as we see right here. So I'm going to click on Color. Click the plus sign, the drop option. Here we go, click there and it's the same color. I'm going to position it to where it looks like it might be your shoulder just about here. This you won't you'll probably not have this issue if you're taking your own photos. I'll move this to the back. Position. To the back. It's not perfect, but it'll do when we make things a little smaller as we scroll out all the way down. Looks, looks okay to me. Again, this is just for demonstration purposes. Now if we get a little bit further in, we increase our canvas size. Canvas size. Let's take a look at our main photo here. Now, I've locked it. Our photo with the pizza and the woman, I want to make a small adjustment. I'm going to unlock it. I'm going to come up to Edit image and adjust. I want to do two things. I want to make it a little brighter. So sort of pops a little bit more. It looks a little cleaner, a little healthier, a little more professional. And I want to give it a tad bit of saturation. So the colors pop. I'm going to move it in just a little bit right about there. If you notice, notice that slight difference. It looks a little pale. Now, the pepperoni is popping and for now, that looks pretty good. I think I'll stop here. This should do just fine. And get the audience's attention for the top seven best pizza places in New York City. You should try an example of a listicle. Next, let's take a look at thumbnails for a versus video. 8. The Versus Thumbnail: With the versus thumbnail videos for these thumbnails, compare one thing against another, a against B. And it's quite common to depict a on one side of the thumbnail and B on the other. Our third thumbnail is a versus them now, but before we get there, I have a little bit of advice for you. As you make more thumbnails, this file will get larger and larger. And notice that new thumbnails tend to show up at the bottom when you create something new, it'll pop down here out of page at the bottom. Instead of that, this is my suggestion was going to do that. Here's our latest thumbnail, top seven pizza places in New York. So what we can do is click this little button arrow up and it becomes, well, the latest one that we've made. I sort of liked to lay out my file like this. So for any new thumbnails, I'll just go ahead and click the add page as the one below it, but then I'll click it up. And this becomes the newest one. So let's go ahead and do that today. As far as R versus topic goes, we're going to do this. Us versus Italy. Pizza wars in sticking with our pizza thing versus videos are fantastic for growing a YouTube channel. I highly recommend spending time and making a few of these videos if you haven't already. So the first thing we can do is let's go up to templates. And we can actually type in the word versus as you see I've done before. And when we do that, we get a few templates that are usable. You can simply click on one and move things around and adjust them as you see fit. Or you can use them for inspiration. That's sort of what I do. Also remember it's a good idea to check out your competition and what types versus thumbnails they use also for inspiration. So my idea here is to have a background of the American flag on the left, the Italian flag on the right. Two pizzas that are sort of setup side-by-side as if they're going to go into battle. So let's do that now. Let's choose the two pizzas. First, I'm going to go to my photos and I already have chosen a few pizzas, not this one. Let's take a look at this one real quick. Now, if you take a close look, this image is actually not crisp and clear. And remember, we do not want low-quality images. It looks better if it's sized down, but if we're going to have it fairly large, it's just not going to be as clear as it should be. So let's delete that. Instead. I'll go click See off What I've used recently. I'm going to use these two pizzas right here. So I'll click on this one and I'm gonna make this my American pizza and sort of move it around. Like you're going side-by-side, size it down to something like this. A little bigger. Play with that more. Okay, so we'll keep that right about, right about here. We'll take our other pizza, get it about the same size. So let's move it in, grab it right about here. So at about the same size and move it over to where they're sort of in the middle. Looks a little bit like they're going to face off because slight angle. Okay, So far, so good. Now we want to put something in the middle that is more or less verse is related. And here's a nice little trick if we go to elements and we just simply type in VS for Vs. we have all of these options. I think they're pretty nice. So I'm gonna go with this one here. Click on it, make it a bit larger. Let's make it the entire screen right about there. Slightly larger. That versus in there. Nice and big. Alright, we'll put it in the center. Now notice up here this one comes with color options. I'm going to change the colors a little bit. So I want more of a yellow. Let's go. Let's go all the way down here and give it that yellow right here. Alright, I'll make it more yellow. Going to change this red to a brighter red, this one default colors down here. I'm going to change the dark red to a black. And I like that. I think it pops a little bit more, sort of goes well with the colors here in the pizzas. Now, let's talk about something called frames and grids. We're gonna go back to elements. Let's click the act so we're start fresh. And if you scroll down, we have frames and grids and they're very similar to each other. It just depends on what we want to do. I'm going to click on Grid. Notice it takes up the entire screen, but I'm just going to slide it over to where it takes up half. I'm going to click on it, copy and paste and put this one on the right, position it to the back. And from here, we can work with our flags. Now let's look for a few flags and the elements. Let's type in US flag. And we've got one right here. Click on it. And I'm going to move it to right above, and it propagates. If you double-click on it, you can move it around. So let's just say right here, how does that look? It looks pretty good. Let's find an Italian flag. Let's just type Italy. And we've got an Italian flag. Let's click on that and put her right up here. And now we've got our Italian flag, but it doesn't look so great. We really liked a little bit less white and more of the green and the red is on the side. So here's a little trick. You can always play around with the scaling. So I'm going to come down to the bottom here and just move it up and it looked at automatically resizes like that, right right about here. Looks good to me. Okay. Now, we got something to work with. So the question comes, do we want any texts in here? And it's fine just to go like this and make sense. We've got pizza versus pizza. But in our title, forgot I deleted something and then create a new one. That's okay, Let's put the title back in here. Us versus Italy, pizza Wars. Now, I thought it might be a good idea to put in something like who wins. So let's go ahead and create some text. I'm going to choose my tried and true favorite, Anton right here. I'm going to give it capital letters. Hou, and I'm going to make it white. Let's say bring it right about here. And then let's copy and paste wins. Let's put it right around here. We're going to skip the question mark because it makes it a little too long. It's just really unnecessary to get people's attention. We don't need to be grammatically necessarily correct. And we need to do something about the backgrounds, not only popping. So we've got outlines in black here. Why don't we sort of put a black outline here so we can see the texts pretty clearly. So what I'm going to do here in elements, I'm going to click the x so it's cleared. I'm gonna come down to shapes and lines. I'm going to click See All. I sort of like this TikTok looking image. Click on that, and I want it black. Make it black. There we go. So let's move it around. It's already in the back here, so let's get it the size about right here, it looks good. Move it out here. This one out right about here, and that looks pretty good. Now, let's put it in the back. Let's go to position, position to the back. Now, here's a common issue where we're playing around moving things forward and backward, but we can't see where they are. So let's, let me show you a little trick to get around that. I click here, I'm going to click another page. Put that page up, we'll use it later. And now my TikTok is missing. That's okay. Let's create another one. Sometimes that happens. Black again. Let's get a little bit larger. Pull up right about here. Let's say move it over to about here. And we're going to reposition it to the back. And then let's go forward. It's a little bit right about there. Okay? Now, we still need to play with the letters. So let's take the words, sort of make them a little bit larger, will make them equal. So this one, if we look up here, it's 182. Let's click on winds. Click 182. Same size. I'm going to take the WHO and reposition it. Let's say backward right there. That looks, look, it looks nice and snug. Alright, let's line these up, or put this one right here. Let's position it. Let's go backwards right about there. It looks okay. But the winds isn't as clear as I would like it to look. So we just manipulate things a little bit further. We could make this a little bit smaller though versus like so. I think that looks okay. And we could highlight everything and move it up a little bit with the arrows. Right about there. I think that looks pretty good. All right, Now notice down here we sort of sort of a mismatching color. Let's give it one color. Let's go ahead and make it, let's say red. So let's click a circle. All you need to do is click in here and press the letter C. We've got her circle. Give it the color red. Let's move it down right about here, and move it backwards. Backward, backward, backward. All right, it looks okay to me, but here's something we haven't played around with the app. And that is outlining, if we click on an image like our pizza, if we come up to Edit Image and then we scroll down, we come to glow. A glow will get us actually an outline. If we want. Click on the little icon in the center again once it's propagated. And then you have these options. I want a white glow, so I'm going to click on the white color. You can play with size, transparency, and blur. I'm going to make the size, say 12. You can see things are changing right here. I'm going to make the transparency all the way up to a 100, so it's really not at all transparent. And then the blur, I'm going to lessen the blur, Let's say right about here. So I've got 12102 with the color white. I'm gonna do the same thing to our pizza on the right. So I'm going to click on glow. Then the icon in the center, just typing the numbers 12, 100 to o, and we got to change our color to white. There we go. Now, if you wanted a different color like red, that's fine. I think that works. Black. That works as well. But for today, I'm going with white. Alright, one more thing. Remember, this is sort of a war. We have the US versus Italy pizza wars. What can we do to sort of get the idea of a war coming across? You can use tanks, you could use missiles. It's up to you. But I want to show you the smoke effect. If we come up to our elements and we clear things out and we type in smoke. There, all these different smoke options and they can really be handy for today. Let's choose a free one right here. Click on smoke. And I can take this. Put it about right here, and position it to the back all the way to the back. And then for once, twice. And then there we go, some smoke in the background. We can copy and paste, bring it over to the right and flip it. Let's flip it horizontal. Do the same thing, position all the way to the back, and then bring it forward once in, twice. And there we go. So what do you think about this versus thumbnail for us versus Italy? Pizza Wars. Next we're going to get into suggested targeted thumbnails, starting with the wow, thumbnail. 9. The WOW Thumbnail: The wild thumb know is designed around a topic that is either over the top and extreme or something that violates people's common beliefs enough to generate a sense of all in the viewer's mind. And the title that we're going to work with with a wow thumbnail is, I tried the world's most expensive pizza. So that should give some sense of all. It's extreme, It's most expensive. And as you see, the price should violate common beliefs. So what I wanna do is go for an image first and I'm just going to use a stock image. Of course, if I was really making this, I would use my own images of the actual pizza. But I'm going to go down here. And I found this image. I think it'll fit just fine for our demonstration. So how can we make this fit our title and our idea? Well, the first thing I wanna do is get rid of this pizza text right here and put something else in. Let's give it a price tag. Now, I don't know how much of the world's most expensive pizza really is. It might depend on where you go. But let's go up to elements and let's type in rehab one. Earlier I liked this price tag and it's a free price tag. I'm gonna get big enough to where it takes up the space, takes over the a text. Right about there. It looks good. And I also want to give it a price. So let's go to text. And I'm going to go back to the texts I've been using, which is can turn. Let's make it $11,176. That is shocking. Shocking in a couple of ways. The number is large enough to where it come. Aid violates common beliefs. How could a pizza cost that much? And it should provoke the viewer to have the desire to find out why and click the thumbnail. In addition, the numbers are strange. It's not $12 thousand, it's not $11 thousand is 11,176. So it seems a little bit more, let's say realistic and intriguing with the text. I'm going to give it an effect. Click over here. And I like this lift effect sort of makes it pop. It looks good. There also our price tag. It looks a little generic because it doesn't seem like it's actually there. Let's give it a little bit of shadowing. I'll come up to elements back and I'll type in shadow. And I think I want something that's a bit straight. I've found one right here. It's pro level, but you can always use something that's not. But I'm going to use our pro level shadow for today. I'm going to bring it down right about here is a slight bit of shadow. And I'm going to position it to the back. And there we go. Looks pretty good. You can see it looks like it's sort of hovering over the pizza box. Let's click, Copy and paste. We're going to minimize it a little bit to where it's just about the same size here. And let's actually play a little bit with the transparency. So to make it match other shadow. Because as you, as you minimize it, it gets a little bit more intense. And then position to the back. Okay, that looks pretty good for now. Next I'm going to show you a trick about how to layer images. Now let's look at our background and remember it's already stuck to the back. So I'm going to detach it again. I'm going to get back to the place I want. Now before I clicked out of it, I'm going to copy and then paste. Got the other image here. Now we've got our image that's attached to the back. We've got this image. I want to remove the background. Okay, It's, it's been removed. I'm going to hit apply and I can play with it a little bit. I'm going to position it to where it matches the background right about there. What's interesting with this, and I'll just leave this here for now. We'll change it in a minute. I'm gonna give it some sort of glow. So I want to come up to elements and type in glow. Now use our free one right here. And sort of make it a little bit larger, right about, let's say right about there. And I'm going to position it backwards. You see how it's sort of shining the back. Now it's not perfect. So we'll need to play with it a little bit so it makes sense. Now, while you do that, what you can do is click on our top image here and click Lock. Then I'll click on the command button or Control button and highlight the glow and back and we can move it around like this. Let's say right about here looks pretty yet. I want to do the same at the bottom. Copy and paste and go toward the bottom. Become a little bit larger. Right about here. Position to the back. That glow. All right. Looking okay, so far. However, I want to make this go a little bit more. Let's say see what I'm trying to do. A little bit larger. Sort of, it's sort of coming out to the side. Then I'm going to unlock our top layered pizza box and look at a scroll over. Sort of pops that glow right about here. It looks kind of interesting. Okay, I like the way this looks so far. Then I want to highlight our price tag in number. I'm going to group them together and then position them to the front. Okay. It looks good. Now I want a hand reaching into the pizza because if we don't really want the viewer to see the toppings on the pizza. It's going to be somewhat of a mystery. In order to do that, I want to hand grabbing toward the pizza. So I'll go back to my photos. Have a hand-write here. I like this one. You used it before. So what I'm going to do sort of a little bit smallest crop it a little bit, edit the image by removing the background. There we go. Let's make it a little bit larger, right? Lb, right about here. It sort of grounding in. Okay. Now, notice the lighting is a little bit off. It's pretty dark on our pizza box, but it's pretty bright on the hand. All we need to do, let's make this a little bit better. There we go. All we need to do is highlight the hand. Go to Edit image, and let's just adjust. The brightness will go down just a little bit right about here. You know, it, it looks like it's matching. It looks pretty good to me. I still want something intriguing. Let's give it a, another glow. Now what I'm going to do here is go back to elements. I'm going to use a pro level below. Now, here's the issue and you can see there's a bit of a zigzag around this glow. I don't know why this is this is the case. Maybe because it's free, but I don't really like it. If you scale it down, not going to really be able to see it. It doesn't make much of a difference. But as we scale up, you can. So I really liked the pro version. This particular Globe does not have any sort of border around it. But instead of the outside, I'm going to use it in the inside and the hand right about here of where to position it backwards under the hand. Play with that glow just a little bit more to enhance it. A little bit larger movement in just a little bit right here. And I think that looks a little better. I'll scale it down, Let's say to twenty-five percent, see what it looks like. And now I think this image has enough wow factor to generate that click. Okay, next we're going to look at the mystery thumbnail coming right up. 10. The Mystery Thumbnail: The mystery thumbnail is a thumbnail that increases curiosity in the mind of the viewer when a gap in knowledge is highlighted, particularly when it relates to a topic that interests them. And the title that we're working with today is the secret ingredient to amazing pizza sauce. And my idea here is to pique curiosity in some way. Let me show you what we're gonna do. I've typed in pizza sauce dripping in. I found an image that sort of suits my needs. Scroll down right about here, and I liked this image and we're going to bring it all the way into center. It looks pretty good to me. I'll move it down right about here. This is going to be the background, but I'm going to copy and paste and we're going to layer our image. So I'm going to copy and then paste. And I'm going to then edit image and remove background and hit Apply. So we've got this image is kinda nice how it's going to work out. I'm going to come back to my background image and I'm going to just completely eliminate saturation, so it's black and white. And then from there I'll take our top image, our top layer, position it to a perfectly overlaps. I think that makes a real striking contrast between the background and really the star of our show, which is the sauce. Next, let's work with some taxed. Again, our title, the secret ingredient to amazing pizza sauce. What I wanna do to create some intrigue and curiosity with text is to type in three tablespoons. So I'll click three tablespoons. And again, I'm going to use Anton. And I'm going to bring it up. Keep it black. I'm going to bring it right about here. And we're increase the size. I'm going to go, let's say C 1155. Now here's a little interesting thing that you can do with your text. Up here. We know how to use effects, that's fantastic, but let's scroll right to left with spacing. Now, if you have more than one line, you can adjust the space between lines, which is really helpful. You can also adjust the letter spacing. Watch what we can do. We can move it in and we can move it out, and that really comes in handy. I'm going to spread it out a little bit so it really makes its way across the screen. Right about here. Looks pretty good. And bring it up a little bit about right about here. Okay, I like that. Now. I want to put it in the background a little bit so I'll reposition its spacing. Where's the spacing? There? It's already pre-positioned spacing to the back. It doesn't really pop. So again, I want to put a block into the background so I'll hit the R for a rectangle. Let's make it white and bring it all the way out, way out. Go up, up, up and bring it back again with spacing or position going backwards, back, back aren't right about here. And I think that looks pretty interesting because he shows us some contrasts with the text and the ladle. In addition to that, I'm going to come up here to elements and I'm going to type in shadow. Now I'm going to use a little bit of a different shadow, this one down here and stretch it out so it's all the way from side to side. Bring it up to where it meets the edge of our block. And I'm going to position it backward behind the ladle. Okay? So this looks pretty good so far we've got our star of our show right here. But again, we want to give it a little bit more intrigue. So I'm going to click on the center image. I'm going to unlock it. There we go. And let's play a little bit with the saturation adjustment here. So we have all our options going to make it pop a little bit more, a little bit redder and slightly brighter. And that should do. I'll come back and lock it again. Next we have this space here and I want some sort of action going on. And I once heard someone describing how when they were using an image for cake or icing on a cake, when the icing was dripping, just about to drip on to the cake, that thumbnail got a lot more clicks in their AB testing. So I wanted to do something like that. And again, I'll come to our photos. It was pizza sauce dripping and I found a bit of a drip. It's not really pizza sauce, but let's see if we can play with it to get that concept working here it is right here. This looks to me like peanut butter. But let's go ahead and scroll down to just get that drip right about here. And we're going to then edit image background remover. Okay, we've got the drip clip of click Apply, but it's not the right color. Let's say we want to write about here. I think this will look, it looks pretty good right about here. Let's enhance it by going to Edit Image and then see all. And we want to sort of match the pizza sauce color. So how can we do that? Let's adjust the tint to where we're closer in the red spectrum. Let's increase the saturation a little bit. Let's increase the warmth a little bit as well. In the vibrance. Okay, I think that's just about right now. We need to reposition it. Let's go backwards behind her lame ladle. That's okay for now. So we're gonna do another little magic trick in a moment, are actually right now. Let's go ahead and come up to our elements again. And, you know, I like to use gloves. I'm going to use another glow, something a little bit different. It's more of a shine is this one right here. And this is pretty cool because the light shines across in multiple directions. I'm going to, obviously this doesn't look perfect or drip. It is really, it looks manufactured so we can hide that a little bit and at the same time create some curiosity and intrigue by putting this shine right here. The final thing I wanna do is let's make use of an arrow. So let's just type in arrow. And I'm going to scroll down and let's grab this one right here. We can reposition it like so. Let's give it the color red. But specifically the color red in the pizza sauce. I like this is fairly bright red right here. Make it smaller. And voila, it looks like we've got a nice mystery thumbnail. Okay. Coming up next, our final thumbnail, the worry thumbnail. 11. The Worry Thumbnail: Worry thumbnail is interesting because it leverages the psychological fact that people take action when they believe they may lose an opportunity that can make their lives better. And the title we're working with here is the real reason your pizzas don't taste right? So what could that be? My idea here is I want a woman. I've chosen a woman to be on the right. Her face doesn't look so good. She's in disgust. And I have a hand. It's going to hold up a pizza and we'll put some texts on here. And as you cause the viewer to question if they're making the same mistake. So let's go over here to photos. Exit out, and let's see which one I chose earlier. Here we go. Let's use this woman here. And I want to put her on the right side. So what I'm going to do is flip horizontally and get to the size that I'm looking for. Usually when you have eyes, you want eyes sort of at this level. So this looks pretty good. I'll put it right about here. And I am going to remove the background. Click Apply. I'll move this over a little bit because this helps if you want to work with anything in this space here. After that, I've got another photo and that's going to be this hand picking up pizza. We're going to do the same thing. We're going to flip it and remove the background. Fantastic hit Apply. Now I'm going to increase the brightness ever so slightly. Alright, there. Actually, this time I'm going to desaturate. Remember, this pizza is not supposed to be delicious, so we're going to desaturate slightly. And that looks pretty good. Okay. I'll put that hand right here. Move it a little bit, a little bit larger. Say right about here, it looks like she's looking at the pizza. And we'll come back to this pizza in a moment. Now we'll come back to this image in a moment. Let's talk about our background. So here's something interesting. You can click on backgrounds here. You have a lot of choices. I wanted to work with a brick background. You can just type that in here and you'll get the same thing, brick background or brick wall. I'm going to click on that and it automatically propagates to the back. That's pretty nice. But there's too much color, so little too busy. So here's another nice trick that you can do with any background, is again, let's use our R and get a rectangle. I'm going to click black for the color. I'm going to move it over and just take it all the way across the screen. And then I'm going to position it to the very back right there. Okay. Once we are there, we have it highlighted still. I want to go to transparency and let's make it about 50%, right about there, 50 per cent. So we add some contrast with the wall and the pizza. Good job. Now that we've done that, I want to come back to the pizza in, let's go ahead and edit the image and give it a glow or an outline. Going to scroll down to glow. But it will become an outline because I'll click in the center of this icon, change the color to white, and then come up here, Let's make the size a little bit larger, full transparency. We're actually 0 at 0 transparency, it's full color and decrease the blur a little bit. So we've got a pretty clear outline there. I'll click apply. It's now sometimes when you make these adjustments, it reconfigures your image. So we just work with it again, bringing in larger right about there. It looks good. Okay, so we've really put the focus on the pizza. Next, let's put in some text. And as usual, ongoing with Anton. I want to say full cat. So your let's put up let's bring up your right here. Change the color as well. Let's make it white. Alright, I'm going to copy and paste just in case I want to play with this pizza. The spacing looks good there. Okay, let's paste again. We're going to get another word. It's going to be sucks. This grabs the attention of a lot of viewers and you might have seen this used before on YouTube. It just happens to be effective. So we're going to use this word as well. But we're going to change the color to red. Let's come up here. Make it really bright red. That looks pretty good. Now I'm going to click right here. I want to log it. Let me lock my pizza too. Now, when everything else is locked except the text, you can just scroll and highlight the text. If you want. You can group it or you can just move it as is. I want it to fit right about let's see, right about here. I think that looks pretty good. And then I wanted to take the word and position it backward behind the pizza. Click. Keep clicking backward until it gets back there. Fantastic. Alright. Now, notice still we are. Tax doesn't really pop. The background is still a little busy. So here's another nice little trick. If we go up two elements. And let's type in gradient. Not only gradient, I want to make it a transparent, transparent gradient. And what do we get? Here's one, for example, let's use this one. Now. We've got purple. It's up to you what color you choose, but I'm going to go with black, and I'm only going to change this purple to block. I'm going to leave white as is. And if I take it, if I put it up here and I stretch it and stretch it all the way over. We positioned it to the back and go to the back. There we go. Look how well this text pops. It looks pretty good. We're almost finished, Not quite yet. I still think we can draw the viewer's attention more toward the pizza and take up some of this real estate in the center by using an arrow. And here's the same error. I liked the same arrow. I'm going to click on this one. I'm going to flip it like so. Move it around, bring it right around here. And put it sort of in the center. The center to where it's right there on top of the pizza. We're pointing right at the tip. The pizza into taking some of this space as well. Let's go ahead and enlarge this image right about here, we get more of that facial expression really popping, okay, and this will be our worry thumbnail. Next, I'd like to show you how to make photos of yourself go from this to this with a free app called Snapseed. 12. Enhance Your Face with Snapseed: Here's a simple and free way to make photos of yourself look more professional on YouTube thumbnails, just get into your phone, download the snap seed application, and then get into that application. And we have this plus sign to add a photo and I'll make my phone go horizontal. Click on the plus sign to find photos and scroll to where you have photos of yourself for your thumbnails. And obviously I have several right here. I'm going to choose this one right here in the middle. Just tap on it and you can start to edit. Now, this is a pretty comprehensive piece of software, but we're only going to do something quick and easy. Now, let's zoom into my face. This is what it looks like. Little discoloration, a little bit of age there. But let's try and take care of this little problem. If you look over to the right, there's a little pin icon or pencil icon. Just click on that and scroll up to where we have portrait. Click on portrait. And what it automatically does is it'll put on what's called a base spotlight. Let's zoom into my face here. One effect has already been applied. You can see up here at the top there's a blue bar. I need to take my finger. I'm going to press it on the screen and go left and right. And I'm going left and right, net right now, you should be able to see that blue bar go left and right as well. The more to the right, the more than that face spotlight or feature is going to increase. To the left, it will decrease. Let's take a look at my face getting lighter and darker. I like this effect. It brings more attention to your face. So I'm going to put it right about here, but pretty good. That's not the only thing. If you also touched the screen and scroll up and down, like this, we have three options. They spot is what we just use, the scroll up to. Skin smoothing. This is great. I'm going to move to the right, move to the right. And notice, let's, let's go all the way to left first. I have a few wrinkles up there at the top. Let's see if we can sort of smooth those out a little bit. I'm going to scroll to the right. And it sort of takes away some of these imperfections. If I go all the way to the right, it starts to look a little unnatural. So I'll go somewhere in the center. Pretty good. And if you want, you can scroll up to i clarity and take a, take a look at the eyes. If you go too far, it gets a little cartoony, but if that's the effect you want or fine, go for it. I'm going to minimize that effect. Just put a little bit of it there. And once you're finished, what you can do is tap on the screen, hold it down. And it will show the original like this. And then take your finger off and it will show you what you've done. There you go. Before, after, before, after. This is really helped me with my thumbnails whenever I'm using my face and hopefully it will help you as well. 13. Want to See More?: So would you like to see more examples of thumbnails or would you like to see more examples of effects in Canva regarding thumbnails? One, either push your thumbnail example here on Skillshare or to simply post a comment about what you'd like to see. I'll answer your questions as best I can and even create a dedicated video to try to answer your questions. We'll call these bonus videos fewer requests. So let me know and that brings me to your class project. Remember, the more you practice, the better you're going to get designing your own Canvas, thumbnails for YouTube. So be sure not to miss the next video all about your class project. 14. Your Turn (Class Project): Great. Now it's time for you to create and share your own Canva YouTube thumbnails here on Skillshare. And I'll give you my own personal thoughts about what I liked about your thumbnails and any possible recommendations or advice I have for you. Your class project is to create a thumbnail on Canva and posted along with the videos title by clicking Create Project under the projects and resources tab. I honestly can't wait to see what designs you come up with. Also. Thank you so much for being a part of this class. Thank you and see you in the next course. Don't forget the class project. Take care. Bye-bye.