in this video I show you how to create a YouTube banner if this video helps you
please remember to like subscribe click the bell to receive notifications and
leave a comment down below welcome my name is Joe this video is part of a
series so if you've missed the other videos or want to skip ahead go to the
playlist that's linked to the top right card or the description below now let's
get straight into setting up a youtube banner the first thing we want to do is
come over to your channel make sure you're logged in go to your channel and
as you can see I've got a default image up here now this is the first thing that
people are gonna see when they come to your channel so it's important that this
is looking crisp it's looking sharp and it's relevant to what you're presenting
and what your niche is all about so the first thing we need to do is actually
create an image now I've got a template which I'm gonna link in the description
below for you and it's gonna look like this it's saved in a program called GIMP
and if you need any help or tutorials on GIMP then I've got a playlist that I'll
link in the description below for you as well
just quickly to describe this file if you decide to use it then the
recommended size is already set out for you it's to hunt 2560 pixels by 1440 now
that's for the really big TV screens and anything that has a very high resolution
these screen sizes aren't that common at the moment so it's probably best not to
cater a hundred percent for this but it's worth knowing about and it's worth
making sure the file will actually work with that screen size as well as we move
into the box just slightly inside which is the light blue color this is the
minimum upload size which is 2048 by 1152 pixels now what that means is that
you have to send a file to YouTube that has this minimum requirement here so if
your file is smaller than that it's not gonna look right and YouTube may even
stop you from uploading it if it's too small now what happens if you don't have
that exact size is that the image will get stretched or you have to crop it
when you do the upload so it's just to get that straight out right and
again this minimum upload size caters for the larger screen now the important
bit that most people will be interested in the kind of the long thin banner that
is what people are actually gonna see if they were on a desktop computer or if
they are on maybe a higher resolution tablet or something like that this is
the important screen size part here and what you'll see is the lines that go in
this will chop a tablet a standard sized tablet and then this line here will chop
at a phone or a smaller device so anything within this safe minimum area
that is what you're going to see on every single screen no matter what what
device the person is using so it's probably a good idea to have your main
logo or image or whatever you're having in here and then the things here are
gonna be seen by a few less people and the things here are gonna be seen by
probably hardly any people if we're realistic it's only gonna be a select
few that have the highest screen resolutions but obviously be aware the
screen resolutions are always increasing in in their quality so that will become
more and more popular over time and then YouTube will probably release a new
recommended upload size anyway but that's all in the future so the main
thing to realize here is that we are looking at this box here and everything
that we do needs to really be within this box my personal recommendation is
if you've got a really large image that you can have as a background then
fantastic but if you're creating something that I'm going to show you in
a minute then then just leave the outside white or minimalistic because
hardly any people are gonna see it anyway so if you have any questions on
that please leave a comment in the description below and I will get back to
you as soon as I can now I'm going to demonstrate a very
quick and easy manner that I'm going to create for for the tutorials that we're
doing now so I'm going to head over to another file that I've already opened
and all I'm gonna do is select everything and
copy it and then paste it back into this file here in it's gone below so let's
put it on top and I'm gonna resize that just to make it a little bit better okay
so it's resized into the minimum safe area and now I'm gonna click on to the
alignment tools to the file and just Center it as well so in the very center
of the whole image and now what I'm gonna do is just take off the view of
all of the other things so we know it's right in the very center and I actually
want to create a new layer with a white background just to make it look a little
bit crisper so for the purposes of this demonstration is quite simple but it's
looking pretty good as well so let's go and save that and then I'm gonna export
it as a JPEG image and it's entirely up to you but I always put this up to a
hundred percent because there's a very small file different the higher the
quality the higher the file size image as well but because we've got quite a
little white on the screen and there's not too much going on that shouldn't be
a problem for this image it would it might be a problem if you
had a particular large file and it has to be lower than
six megabytes in terms of size so mine won't be backs for that big but if yours
ends up being higher than six megabytes you may have to lower the quality to
make sure it's under six megabytes in file size okay so how do we upload to
here we go into the little picture make sure you're logged in go into the little
picture icon in the corner and then select the file from your computer
as you can see it gives you three different views and even the mobile view
it has the image completely within there it's pretty close because we made it as
big as we could but actually that fits perfectly TV it's got on a white space
and then the desktop it's got a little bit white space on the corners but not
too much you can adjust it if you haven't scented it quite correctly or
you can choose different options up here and also click this alternate enhance
which in some cases may help you if you've got a large file with a big
graphic then this can enhance the colors and generally what this does is it gives
you a slightly different kind of background as well so it kind of pops it
out of the screen slightly my case I don't actually want that so I'm going to
take it off so it goes back to a white screen and then I'm going to select okay
and you've got your image up here now what will happen this will over time
this will get a little bit crisper so at the moment it looks a little bit blurry
on the screen that's because it's just uploaded very quickly in a low
resolution YouTube will over time actually make that a lot better so if i
refresh in a few seconds it will look a lot crisper and the the quality will
have increased I don't know if you can see the difference there but it does
look a lot better now remember to like subscribe and leave a comment thanks
very much for your time and I'll see you in the next video