- I'm gonna show you how to make a YouTube thumbnail
that actually gets clicked.
We're gonna run through this tutorial using
the top free YouTube thumbnail maker app that I recommend
so you can learn to create awesome custom video thumbnails
quickly and easily.
Now for this, you don't need to be using
professional apps like Photoshop.
Obviously if you can, then by all means, go for it.
But for most people, this is just a huge time sink,
that you can get awesome results
just using simple and free tools
that are available to everyone.
So over the years,
we've gone back and forth
between a couple of different tools,
but my top two recommendations right now
for creating thumbnail images
and other graphics and things for YouTube
are Canva and Snappa.
Now I have links of those down in the description.
Now both of these have great features and templates
and things already built in,
making this task really easy for you.
But our number one pick right now is Canva
and that's what I'm gonna be taking you through
in this training.
Because right now
there are some more templates and things to choose from
and some more advanced features
that you don't have in Snappa yet.
And don't worry,
I'll call out any of the paid features that I'm using
and I'll also give you some alternatives
so you can create something here totally for free.
Now the first thing you want to do
is grab a photo or an image that you can use of yourself
if you wanna be in that thumbnail image.
Now I wanna stress here,
you wanna be intentional about creating this.
You don't wanna have to try
and scrub through one of your videos
and try find that perfect freeze frame
where you're not talking, half smiling,
something that looks decent.
It's so much easier
if you just leave your camera recording
at the end of recording a video,
smile, point, pull some silly faces,
and that's what you're gonna use
to form the basis of your thumbnail image.
Now to extract a still image or a photo from your video
there are some great free tools out there to do it.
Most video editing software will let you do it.
So by all means use your video editing software.
But the free tool that I use
to make this really fast and simple is called VLC Player.
And it's available on both Mac and Windows.
So you just wanna open up your video file in VLC,
scrub through or find the place
where you want to capture that image.
Then you just need to go up to the menu at the top
where it says Video,
go down to Snapshot,
and that's gonna save that image for you
in your photos area on your computer.
Okay, so I'm over at Canvas website now.
You wanna go ahead and sign up,
create a free account if you don't have one yet.
Let me go ahead and log in.
Now from there, if we come up to the top middle here,
to this search area,
there's lots of different presets and templates
and things in here.
So we just start typing in YouTube,
we can see here we've got YouTube thumbnails,
YouTube banner, YouTube channel logo.
Let's go to YouTube thumbnails.
And you can see that as we scroll down here,
there are just so many different
templates and things in here
that you can use for inspiration,
that you can also fully customize up and create your own,
have them match your brand
and the look and feel of the thumbnails
that you wanna create.
So you don't have to start from scratch in here.
That's what I love about this.
And what I love about Canva
is there's so many different templates and things in here.
Now you do wanna note
that the ones with the little crown down the bottom here
are the ones that aren't available for free.
So you'll see there's so many here that are,
but all of these ones here,
you will need to jump on the pro plan for those,
which is still ridiculously cheap.
But even say, this one here.
If I just click on this, this is a free one,
everything in here is customizable.
We can move stuff around, we can change the fonts,
we can edit the text,
we can delete things that we don't want.
This is what I love about these tools.
Now I'm gonna go back out of this.
We're gonna create something totally custom here.
So I'm gonna go up the top corner here, create design.
I'm gonna come down to Custom size.
And I'm gonna type in 1920 for the width
and 1080 for the height.
Now this is probably the biggest
that you want to create your thumbnail images in.
So this is the equivalent of a 1080p video.
You can also use 720p.
So 1280 by 720, that's gonna be fine too.
But for us, we'd like to create a bigger file,
so that you can repurpose and reuse this to other places.
And it's gonna work fine on YouTube too.
Let me go ahead and click Create new design.
So then this here is our design or canvas area.
So what we're gonna start with
is we're gonna put in a background color or a gradient.
Just something to start with that we can tweak and adjust
as our template here evolves.
So I'm gonna come up here to Elements.
And in here, we can see that we can add in lines and shapes
and graphics and stickers,
and there's photos and things we can use as backgrounds.
And there's a lot in here.
But what I think is really powerful
is the ability to search in Canva.
So we can come up here and we can search for gradient.
Run that search.
And as we scroll down,
there's lots of different gradients and things
that we can use as a simple background.
Now I'm gonna sort this here by Graphics.
And then, I'm just gonna pick a simple one here.
Now let's go ahead and scale this up
so that it fills our entire background.
Now these aren't really the colors that we want.
So with this image selected,
we can come up the top here and pick new colors.
So let's say down this left side here,
we wanted to have a dark blue.
We can go ahead and try to pick something close
to what we want.
Maybe something like that.
And for the second color, maybe a lighter blue.
That might be a bit light, we can customize that up.
Let's darken it down a little.
Okay, so that'll probably do for the background here.
Now let's go ahead and add in our photo.
So we wanna come over here to Uploads
and we wanna upload a file.
We wanna navigate through and find our file.
So here is my image from VLC.
I'm gonna hit Open on this one.
You can see that that's uploading on the side here.
So we're selecting that image,
that's gonna bring it in to our project here.
Now we could just scale this up
and use this as our entire image.
So we could create our thumbnail
from something like this
and add some text and graphics and stuff from here
and we're good to go.
Or what we can do
is we can actually remove the background and cut me out here
and create something pretty creative.
So with this image still selected,
I wanna come up here to Edit image
and I'm going to choose Background Remover.
that's gonna go ahead and it's going to analyze the image,
it's going to remove the background and cut me out
and make the background transparent.
Now this feature isn't free,
you can't access this on the free Canva plan,
but don't worry I'm gonna show you
how you can get the same effect
in just a minute as well.
So you can see here that's done a really good job.
And now I have a transparent image
that I can pick up and I can move around
and use however we want in this thumbnail.
Now there's lots of different ways
that you could remove the background
outside of using this tool.
For those of you that are on an iPhone,
you can open this image up on your phone in the Photos app.
So I'm gonna go ahead here and select this image.
All we now need to do with the latest update
is just tap on the person, this case it's me.
And you can see it's already outlining me on there.
So I can hit Share, I can then come down here to Save image.
That's gonna save it as its own transparent graphic.
There's the next one in the Photo Library there.
And then we can just send this back to the computer.
Come back over here to Uploads.
Let's upload that other file from our phone,
choose Open.
And you can see we've got the transparent version
that has been uploaded here now.
So again, same outcome, same end result,
but there's other ways to do it too.
But personally I love Canva has this built in.
I think it's really powerful.
It's fast and that enough for me
is enough to justify the expense.
Now speaking of expense,
for those of you that are interested,
here are the pricing plans.
This is showing US dollars.
You can see everything that's included in the free plans.
You can do so much in here without needing to spend a cent.
But for those of you
that are looking for that background remover,
the extra templates, the extra storage and stuff,
then this is gonna start at 12.99 per month.
It is cheaper if you go the yearly option as well.
But again, it's absolutely amazing
what they're giving you access to in even the free option.
Okay, so we've got our photo in here,
we have a background.
I'm gonna select on the photo.
We can tweak some of the colors and things in here
by coming up to Edit image.
We can then go either to Adjust or to Photogenic.
So Photogenic is more like
filters and things that you would see on Instagram.
You can see if I click on these,
they're gonna look a little different.
Now we can customize these up.
If you find something that's close to how you want,
you can see that there is
a little settings button on this too,
and we can adjust the intensity of it.
So this was the original
and this is with that filter applied.
So the filters are pretty good in this Photogenic area.
If I cancel out of this,
we also have the ability to Auto Enhance,
which is like an auto color correction tool.
I don't really think that did a great job,
we can cancel out of that.
But the one that I would use the most is just under Adjust.
And then in here, we got a lot of your standard,
sort of color grading, color correction features.
Things like the brightness, contrast.
Brightness and Contrast would be
the first two that I would be playing with.
Then I would be jumping down here to Warmth.
So we can either cool it down
or make it look a bit more blue
or a bit more yellow and orange,
warm it up a bit with this slider here.
Now if you wanna add more detail to it
to make it stand out a bit more,
this is what the Clarity slider is.
So you don't wanna go too much,
but normally just adding a little bit of clarity on here
can work well with your thumbnail images.
So those are the main ones that I'm playing with.
Sometimes I'll increase the vibrance a little bit as well
to maybe bring back some skin colors here.
And that's looking pretty good.
So let's deselect that now.
Then we're gonna go and add in a background
for some text that we're going to add.
So I'm gonna come over here to Elements.
I'm gonna make sure we don't have any searches
currently active.
I'm gonna choose a rounded box here,
'cause this thumbnail here is about YouTube thumbnails.
So I'm gonna create something in here
that kind of looks a bit like a YouTube thumbnail
that I'm holding one up.
So maybe something like that.
In terms of color, with this selected,
I can come up here and change the color.
Maybe we'll go a golden kind of color.
Yeah, maybe something like that.
It'd be good to start with.
We can add a border to it
by clicking the little icon next to it.
Let's increase the border weight.
And maybe we'll make the border,
we can change the color here.
Let's make the color white.
Now with these selected,
I might come back up here to the border
and let's adjust the corner rounding.
Let's increase that a little bit
to there a bit more round on the edges.
Maybe something like that.
Maybe we will stretch this out a little bit more here
and maybe down a little bit more.
So now let's come over here and add in some text.
And again, in here lots of different presets and things.
So if you find something you like the look of,
then you can click to add that to your project.
But I'm gonna create something custom from scratch.
So we're gonna go Add a heading
and I'm gonna type in YouTube.
We're gonna select the text here.
I'm gonna come up here and choose our Primal Video font,
which is Oswald and bold.
And I'm going to increase the size.
So we can do that here using the plus and minus.
Or we can just click and drag from down here
and scale this up.
So maybe something like this.
Let's change the color of it to red.
Now we want a brighter red,.
so I'm gonna go custom color.
Let's drag this up the top there.
Now let's move this up here.
Probably a little off center, maybe around here.
Now to add our next line of text,
we don't need to go and create it again from scratch.
If we select our first text box here,
we can hit Duplicate and it's gonna give us a copy of it.
Let's pull this down here beneath it.
And let's change this text to Thumbnails.
Now for this one here, let's scale this down a bit
so that it actually fits in line
with our YouTube text above it.
And pull it down a little bit more, YouTube Thumbnails.
And for this one,
we're gonna change the color to a dark gray.
And let's duplicate that one again.
Let's move it down.
YouTube Thumbnails.
Let's select this and go, Easy and Free.
Let's change this one here to white.
And let's make this one a little bit smaller.
'Cause the most important piece of our thumbnail image here
we want the viewers to read first
is the words YouTube and Thumbnails.
And it just happens to be easy and free.
So that's a lower priority for the text here.
Now that white text really isn't that easy to read on here.
So what we would do with our branding
is we would add a text box here behind it.
So I'm gonna go Elements.
I'm gonna choose a basic square.
I'm gonna pick this square up,
I'm gonna move it behind this text here,
something like this.
With that box still selected,
we can come back up the top here.
We can add in our Primal Video blue.
So if I hit on plus here
I have the Primal Video blue copied,
I can paste that number in.
There is our blue.
Now what I'd normally do here
is because we've got the text layer and the background,
I'd actually wanna group the two together.
'Cause if we go to move something around right now,
the two of them are separate.
'Cause I wanna put them into position where we want them
and I wanna select both of them.
So I wanna select the background.
I wanna hold down a Shift and select the text.
And then we can come up the top here to these three dots
and choose Group.
So now if we pick this up and move it around
it's actually moving both of those elements around
at the same time.
And because we want this piece here
to almost look like a YouTube thumbnail,
we could probably add a few more
little graphic elements on there
so that it stands out, looks a bit more interesting.
So if we come down here to the circles.
Let's add a circle.
Let's move it down here and let's make it really small.
Okay, that kind of small.
Let's bring it down here.
Let's change the color on it again
to be our Primal Video blue.
So now we've got one,
I'm gonna make quite a few of them.
So we're gonna select this one here.
We can come up here to Duplicate.
Let's position this one next to it, where we want it,
little bit of a gap between them.
Now let's select both of them so we can hold down Shift.
We can then hit Duplicate on both of them,
that's gonna give us two more.
Position those where we want it.
Let's select all four of them, duplicate those,
line them up to where we want them.
And now I'm gonna select all of them,
hit Duplicate and let's put it directly underneath.
Something like that.
Let's select the rest of them here
so that we can group them all together.
In case we need to move them around,
we don't have to do it individually.
So we hit the three dots again, group them,
and we've now got that as a graphic that we can move around.
Now, make this stand out a little bit more,
I might add a bit of a border around the outside here.
So I can come back over here to Elements,
I can choose, maybe we'll go right angle.
Let's scroll down.
And so we could use one of these.
This is on the pro plan only.
It's a right angle shape that we could then bring in here.
We could rotate it, scale it down,
maybe change the color of it to white.
And I'd then copy and paste that to each of the four corners
just to make it stand out a little bit more.
Or we can actually create this ourselves.
So if I remove this now,
so we don't need to use the pro graphic.
I can remove our search here, so we're still under Elements.
Let's go right to the top.
Let's just create a simple line.
Here is our line,
let's put it up the top here, close to where we want it.
Let's shorten this down.
We can adjust the thickness up the top here.
If we wanted to make it a little bit thicker,
so maybe we go to five.
We can change the color of it from black to white.
We can hit Duplicate, so we've got two of them.
We can then grab this little rotate arrow here.
And we can move it around until it says 90
so we know it's perfectly straight.
We can then pick that up and we can move it
so it lines up perfectly with the other one.
And we've now created our own very similar graphic.
Now again, if I select both of those,
we can group them, and I can duplicate it.
So we can move this down now to this bottom corner.
And let's rotate it.
Let's duplicate it again, move it to the other side.
And again, we can line all these up
so they're perfectly aligned with how we want them.
Let's rotate this around to minus 180 and select it,
duplicate it again for the final corner.
Let's move that up the top here and rotate that around.
Okay, so it's starting to look pretty good.
I do wanna add in one extra little graphic
that we have on our computer.
So I'm gonna go to Uploads.
I'm gonna upload a file.
So this is where you could upload
anything that's related to the thumbnail
you're talking about.
If you're talking about say, Adobe Premiere,
you could put Adobe Premier's logo on there
so your viewers know what it is you're talking about.
But I'm gonna go to Desktop, I'm gonna go to Images,
I'm gonna bring in the mini Justin riding a bike,
because why not?
We can select on that.
I scale this down a little bit, maybe something around here.
Again, we can do this background removal.
So if I select the image,
come up here to Edit image, Background Remover,
it's gonna take all of that green out of the background.
And we can now drag this across to where we want it.
Maybe something like this.
And hey, this is looking pretty similar
to the thumbnail image that you likely clicked on
to be watching this video.
So now we've got everything pretty close.
I'd probably come back in and tweak some of the colors
if I wanted to adjust the background
a little bit darker, a little bit brighter.
If I wanted to make any minor adjustments
to the skin colors or anything like that
with the tools that I've shown you
I'd be doing some minor tweaking.
And then, it's time to save this out.
So you wanna come up the top here to Share when you're done,
then down to Download.
Now you can either use in here a PNG file or a JPG.
I'm gonna go with JPG, I'm gonna choose Download.
We can see here that our file is downloading.
It then ask us where we wanna save it.
We can then hit Save.
And then, when we wanna add this to our YouTube video.
We can go back over to YouTube.
Open up your YouTube Studio dashboard area.
Go over to Content.
Select the video that you want to add it to.
I'm just gonna pick this one here.
So if we scroll down, we can see we've got thumbnail image,
select or upload a picture.
We can select the three little dots here
and we can change this image
to be the one that we have just created.
So now that you know how to create
an amazing looking thumbnail image,
if you wanna learn how you can actually
get your videos showing up
and performing on YouTube consistently,
without needing to rely on hoping
that one of them goes viral,
then check out our free PDF download linked on screen,
where we take you through our YouTube ranking process.
So don't forget to grab your free copy now
and I'll see you in the next video.