- [Roberto] Hey everybody, this is Roberto Blake
of RobertoBlake.com, helping you create something
awesome today.
So welcome to another quick Photoshop tutorial.
Today I'm gonna show you how to make
YouTube channel artwork, using Adobe Photoshop
and the simple tools here.
So what I have is a YouTube channel template,
and if you type in YouTube channel art template
in Google, you can find templates like these
that tell you all the safety margins
and the sizes and dimensions that you need.
To be able to upload this to YouTube
and have it accept it, you need to go ahead
and use the maximum dimensions, which are
2560 by 1440, so you'll wanna do that and I would
recommend going with 72 or 96 dpi for this
in your Photoshop settings when you're
exporting it as a jpeg, because that will help you
with the appropriate file size,
and make sure that it has a good resolution
when it's showing up on screens and mobile.
So this tells you all of the proper safety margins
and it gives you those guides to be able to use
to make your YouTube channel artwork.
For context, this is what my current YouTube
channel artwork looks like as of the making
of this video with my thumbnail profile in there
and all of the things.
So that's what it would look like.
This is the Photoshop layout for me having
used this template and mapped everything out,
but I've been thinking of updating this
and I don't know if I'll keep this
after this tutorial, so I'm just gonna
kind of walk you through some of the basics
and how I would do this, and I'll even use
this kind of from scratch here,
just to kind of set things up.
So what I want to do is, I think that I want
a different background color, and for now,
just because I need these guidelines to work with,
I'm going to go ahead and, I don't know that I want
this gray, but I'll just start with that
as a base for now, to get started.
And you can see what that looks like there.
And so I know that one of the things that I wanna do is,
I wanna bring my Always Be Creating logo here
to the center, so I'm just gonna drag that over.
So let me grab that, and this is an Adobe
Illustrator file that I'm using,
so I'm gonna scale that down, and then I'm gonna use
Control and the right bracket to move that to the front,
and you can see that's over that template area.
I need a box, so that I can just kind of see
what's going on.
So I'm going to go ahead and use the rectangle tool.
I'm gonna say that I don't want a stroke around this.
I'm just gonna make a rectangular box here,
so that I can see what's going on,
and I'm just gonna move that behind my layer.
And I can control this, I can make this whatever
color or gradient that I want it to be.
So that's actually pretty convenient.
I could go to the color picker and if I want this
to be a nice orange, which is something I had before,
I can do that, and so that's exactly what
I'll get out of that.
And for now, we're going to just roll with that.
I may change the colors, or I may make this a gradient,
but for now we'll just work with that,
because it's actually really convenient
for just what we're doing here.
So what I'm gonna do is, I'm gonna group these,
and I'm gonna call this channel art
so that I can toggle that, and you can use use
Control + G to group this stuff, or you can
just make a new group folder here in Photoshop
with the create new folder.
But I'm going to toggle that off so that I can see
what we have going on here, just in terms of the
safety areas, so we can see that, and that looks good.
One of the other things that I want to do
is I think that I want to put one of my
mini Roberto characters here to the side,
you'll only see it on the desktop version,
but that's perfectly fine, I'm good with that.
And so what I want to do is, I think I'll use this one.
So I'm gonna drag him over, and I'm gonna size him
so that we can see the play button, and so
we can see the Create Something Awesome
on the t-shirt there, and we're gonna do that.
Now there's a problem, or maybe it's not a problem,
with the fact that this character is standing off
of the area that we have here, which this could be fine
if you want this whole thing to show up on a television
set instead of just mobile, and this can go ahead
and have some overlap here.
I'm gonna toggle off my guides here,
just so you start to get a sense of what this looks like
without the YouTube guides and the template behind it
and you can see that that's actually not bad.
So I could leave it like that, or I could mask this out,
so that after this, you have it cut really with
this rectangle, but I don't think I need to do that,
because I think this actually works
in the context of a full size thing
that would work on a television screen in terms
of full size layout.
So I'm actually okay with this for right now,
and I just have to decide, do I want borders on this
that show up when it's on a television screen.
I think I might for that rectangle.
So I can click on this rectangle,
go to the rectangle tool, and I can go ahead
and I can add a white border, and we'll have that there.
So I'm actually okay with this.
This actually looks pretty good, and I'm
satisfied with that.
Alright, so we have that there, and I think that
that looks good, regardless of what color
the background is.
Actually I think that looks pretty awesome.
You know, as for this rectangle shape,
I think that I might want a little bit of a gradient,
so I can go to my effects, and I can do a gradient overlay,
I don't think I want it to be quite that exaggerated,
so I'm gonna turn it down a little bit,
maybe to about 25%, and so, I think that actually
looks pretty cool, and I think for the text,
I think I wanna add a little bit of a drop shadow.
Not a really heavy one, and I don't think I want it
that far away from it, I want just enough
to kind of stand off of it.
So I'm just moving this, instead of using the
distance and doing that manually, I'm just
clicking on this, and dragging that,
I don't think most of you realize
you can do that with the drop shadow.
So I can literally just eyeball this,
and I'm pretty happy with that,
with the 20% there, 'cause I like subtlety.
I like these little, subtle things,
and you can see that this is already very different
than this, by comparison I think my other one
feels slightly cluttered, but I don't think it was bad.
I just kind of like this a little bit more,
and I think it fits more with the current direction
of my channel, so that's fine.
Now if I like what's going on here,
and I do like this one particular thing,
and I don't want to have to cut this out
all over again, so what I'm gonna do is,
I'm actually gonna do something interesting,
I'm going to drag this over here,
yup that's fine.
I'm gonna drag this over here,
because I wanna use it again, and I'll show you
how I handle the masking to clip this the way
that I need it, to have that headshot of me in there.
And I think that that's gonna be fine,
so I'll just drag this back up into Photoshop,
I don't need it anymore, thank you.
And here's the trick that I'm gonna use.
I can do this a couple of ways.
For one thing, I need to put this behind the ABC
and I think I want to angle it slightly, just a bit.
Yeah, I think maybe that's okay.
So if I want to make sure that this is cut off
in a specific way, there are a couple
of things I could do.
For one thing, I could just lower it down to here,
and that's fine, but if I don't want this overlap,
what I can do is I can put a guide right here
that's gonna help me with eyeballing this,
and then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take
my rectangular marquee tool, and I'm gonna
select that, and then I'm gonna go here
and I'm gonna create a mask.
And you'll notice what that did.
That cut off right where I needed to,
and so that's fine.
And if I want to select this mask,
I can move it up just a nudge
if I think I needed to.
Actually, let me click this so that the mask
is unlinked, so I can just move the mask,
'cause I think I need to move it up a pixel.
Nope, it was fine.
We can zoom in just to make sure.
Yeah, it's right there on the line,
so it's perfect.
Alright, so that's where I need the mask to be.
And so far, this actually looks fine.
This is actually similar to what I have
going on over there.
And then if I select my smart object,
I can just move that in, I think that's probably
a little closer to what I had.
'Cause the placement for that, that was fine,
so I think that this actually looks pretty good,
and if I wanted to do something else,
just to kind of make what the channel is about
very clear, I can go ahead and add something,
just like I did in my original channel artwork.
A lot of times you'll want to add something
that tells people either your upload schedule,
or what the value proposition of the channel is,
just something to make things less confusing,
make things perfectly clear.
And so what I could do with this,
is I could select my rectangle tool,
in this case I think I'm going to use,
just go ahead and use a two pixel stroke here, we'll see.
I think this is fine.
I'll need to bring this up in the
layer hierarchy a bit.
And what I want to do is I wan this to have a fill
of maybe something like, I don't know, like 40%,
something like that, we'll see how I feel about it.
I think that's fine.
Then I'll use white text, definitely gonna need
to make this smaller, maybe 30 points or so, we'll see.
And this is going to say, definitely can make
that smaller than 30 points, need to bring that down.
Creative entrepreneurship, alright, so that looks
pretty good, and I wanna know that this is in the center
of everything, so I'll just center align it based on that,
instead of eyeballing it, and I will do the same here,
and that tells me that that's the center.
Okay, good.
Alright.
That's pretty good, that's close to what I had
over here, I think the difference is minor,
and I think the difference is, I think the way
that YouTube handles this,
that I need to shrink this just a little bit.
And then it's probably fine.
And again, I'm trying to get this close to my
overall original here, because I did that stuff
in the first iteration of this for a reason,
and it's because it worked.
So, okay, this isn't bad overall,
In my case, I think I want this more than 50%
opacity though, I think I want closer to 75 or 80.
And then in terms of the actual shape here,
I think I want to give it a little bit more
breathing room.
I think it actually looks a lot better like this
to be honest, and I may just end up using this
as the new YouTube channel artwork.
So ultimately kind of what I've shown you here,
and I think that there's still a little bit
of room for improvement, I think that I can
shrink this down, so what I'm gonna do is I'm
gonna hold Alt and scale that down from the top,
and I'm just doing this, I prefer to work
with my eyes, rather than making sure
that all this is quote, unquote perfect
a lot of the time.
So you'll have to kind of just humor me
on that a little bit.
Alright, and I'm just making sure that I have
all this under artwork here, because what I'm gonna do
is I'm gonna turn these guides back on,
just so you get a sense of what's going on.
Alright, so as you can see, I've got everything
that I really need, is within the margins of safety
here for the desktop.
So everything that I really need to have in the center
is in the center.
So that actually works out really well for me,
and it balances out pretty well visually.
It is gonna be slightly left heavy on this side,
but I'm okay with that, and I kind of need it to be.
And this will play out very well in previews
and on the mobile app, and then we know
that over on the other side, is that's where
if we look at what my old channel art was,
we know that, okay, this will balanced out fine here,
and if I want to, let's say I do want to add my
hashtags in, then I know more or less,
where I can put those within the margin of safety.
I can just bring down another margin here for myself,
and know okay, put them there so it's not hitting
my profile picture, and so, I can go ahead
and I can add those hashtags, so people know
what to hit me up with in social media,
and that would work out just fine.
So I really do like this approach to doing
the YouTube channel artwork, in my case,
I think this works out.
And for a lot of you, just doing very simple things
like this, going ahead and knowing, you know what,
let me put something interesting on that
far right side to balance out where the profile
picture will be, centering your text,
making it simple, using gradients.
These are all straightforward things
that will make your YouTube channel artwork better.
There are fancier things I could do.
I could've put stuff in the background,
I've done that before.
I could've faded stuff, but this is the simple
version of making effective YouTube channel artwork,
and I think that this is the approach
that a lot of you could take,
and you'll get reasonable results.
So this is what I was able to do and come up with,
pretty much working just with what I had.
I had my logo, I had a profile pic that I liked,
and I had one graphic element that I really wanted to use.
And so ultimately, that let me produce
pretty nice overall YouTube channel artwork
that has good visual balance good coloring,
and I'm pretty happy with it.
Anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed this.
If you want me to do some more tutorials
showing you how to do social media stuff in Photoshop,
whether it's doing other examples of YouTube
channel artwork, whether it's Facebook, Twitter,
Instagram things, let me know in the comments section.
Also let me know what software tutorials
you want me to cover, do you want me to cover
some other free programs and apps,
do you want more Premiere Pro video editing tutorials?
Let me know that stuff in the comments section too.
Like this video if you like it,
don't forget to subscribe.
Check out the other awesome stuff on the channel.
As always you guys, thanks so very much for watching,
and don't forget, create something awesome today.
Take care.
(upbeat music)