- Videos live or die by the thumbnail
and good thumbnails are kind of hard to come by.
What's even worse is when you know exactly
what you want your thumbnail to look like
but you don't quite know how to make it.
Well, not anymore.
The playing field has been leveled
for those with a lot of imagination
but not a whole lot of time to learn graphic design.
So take a break, Kajabi, we're headed to Canva today.
Okay, so full disclosure here,
I don't have a whole lot of experience with Canva
and all of these AI tools were announced yesterday.
So everything you're about to see I've learned
in like the past two to three hours.
So yeah, let's see what kind of thumbnail we can make.
Okay, so my idea for this thumbnail
was I wanted to do sort of like an I survived type video
but make it ridiculous.
So I survived 20 hours in the woods without my phone.
Who cares, right?
So here is the photo that I took.
It's me on the floor.
So the first thing we're gonna do is click on the photo,
click edit photo, and we're going to the background remover.
Normally this would take me
about a minute to do in Photoshop.
I would get real specific about how sharp the edges were
but honestly, this looks pretty great for what was that?
10 seconds?
Yeah, okay, so I'm in the woods without my phone.
I guess I need a woods background.
So let's go ahead and find one.
I'm gonna search for forest floor.
It has to be at the angle that I'm laying
because obviously I'm on the ground.
So let's just keep looking until we find something.
That's sort of okay.
I think this angle would work pretty well
but it doesn't have a whole lot of color.
Also, I want the phone to be in focus and the fact
that like it's blurry up close in the background,
it feels weird.
So let's keep looking.
What about this?
That's not too bad.
It's got some green in the background.
I think the angle will work.
I know I go a bit fast, so I just wanted to explain
how I'm moving these layers around.
What I'm doing is I'm right clicking the photo, I'm going
to layers and then I'm clicking send to back
and that sends the photo all the way
underneath everything else.
Unfortunately, it also sends it underneath
the previous background layer, at which point I just delete
the previous background layer.
Actually, that's not bad at all.
Almost like I have to kind of twist a little bit here
but yeah, I think we can make that work.
We'll see what it looks like when we get the phone in there.
So the next thing we gotta do is search
for a broken cell phone.
Eh, broken cell phone.
I could pick this one and you know,
this one could work like in that angle
but the problem is it doesn't quite stick out
as a cell phone to me.
I think I should change the search to broken iPhone.
Let's try that.
The search is very specific.
Every time you change it from iPhone to cell phone
to regular phone, you get different search results.
So like this, I hadn't seen this before
but I think that angle is perfect.
So we'll click that and of course, we have a background
that we should remove, which we can do.
So click edit photo, background removal.
And that was fast.
I feel like there needs to be
like a puddle here or something, right?
Let's go ahead and get rid of that phone for now
and let's see if we can put a puddle of water right here.
Edit photo. Let's do the magic edit.
And we want a puddle down here.
I haven't tried this yet, so let's see if this works out.
Puddle of water and then that's it.
Let's see what happens.
Okay, it sort of did.
This isn't too bad.
It's kind of impressive.
It's not quite what I was looking for, but it is a puddle.
Let's just do generate new search results
and see what happens.
I almost wanted the water to like stick out more somehow.
That does not look like...
Yeah, something like that.
We'll roll with that.
Now let's add a cell phone.
This is crazy. Okay.
Man, this is kind of difficult.
Like it's crazy the things that you can do.
What about this one?
That's interesting.
Let's see what happens when we remove that background.
Ay, that's not bad at all.
Okay. All right.
I can deal with that.
In the color of that phone,
I have this like peach kind of thing from the background.
And you can actually edit the color itself
by taking down the saturation.
Yeah. Very cool.
Let's start working on the color.
I can grab the background.
That's the first color I wanna edit.
I wanna see what filters work for it first.
Ooh, that's not bad.
Yeah, okay, we'll do that,
and then we'll edit the color on top of it.
I think the colder makes the green pop.
Yeah, so there's that.
Let's work on the color of me.
Put up the clarity and sharpness a bit.
Crank up that white a little bit.
Bring up the brightness.
Yeah.
What I don't like about this so far
is that I don't have a shadow under me.
And if you click on your photo, you click edit photo,
it gives you the option to make a shadow.
And when you make the shadow you, it makes a drop shadow.
And a drop shadow only works sort of in a 2D way
where it just slightly offsets the shadow.
So the drop shadow won't work on me because the drop shadow
won't go on the ground like I want it to.
What I'm gonna do is duplicate me
and so I've got a second me and I want to go to the color
and I'm gonna make everything as dark as possible.
If there was like a color overlay option,
that would be nice, but it's not the case here.
There we go.
Okay, so now I have a black color overlay
and I want to go to blur.
Now, I crank up the blur a little bit
and then I'm gonna do this background remover thing,
which is the same tool that removed the background before
but it gives you an option to erase more of it
or restore some of it.
So yeah, the shadow would be under my arm, under my chest
and then a little under this area.
That should do it for where I want the shadow to be.
Yeah, so I press back.
I'm gonna lower the transparency a bit, just a a tiny bit
and then I haven't figured out the best way to do this,
but if you right click and you go on layer
and then show layers,
I guess that's one way to get to all the layers.
And then I gotta drag it all the way under me
and there's my shadow.
So it's like the best way I could think
to make a shadow on this.
I don't know.
So yeah, I don't hate this.
This looks pretty good.
Now we're going to mess with the depth a little bit.
If we click the background and click edit photo,
we can head over to auto focus and we should be able
to blur the background more and make the focus more upfront.
Hopefully.
It does sort of like a AI analyzation of everything.
The focus is where the purple is,
which I want to be like right around here.
And then I wanna lessen the blur just a tiny bit.
What else can we do to make this really stick out?
At this point,
I kind of struggled with not knowing where to place myself.
I knew I was missing part of my finger
and at the moment, Canva isn't so good
that you could just draw a finger in.
But when I'm zoomed out, I kind of liked the context
of my full arm in the picture.
So I didn't know if being further away
or closer was the better thumbnail.
Ultimately, I settled on this.
This, wow.
If somebody can understand your thumbnail in two seconds,
that's all that matters.
And this looks like John dropped his phone
in a puddle.
Like, immediately, I can see that.
So yeah, that's just like thumbnail basics.
If you wanna know that stuff,
I have a video for you.
Check it out.
When you're done watching that video, head to Canva.
Apparently, they have all you need.
Wow. (door slamming)