- In this video, I'm gonna show you exactly
how to make custom YouTube thumbnails on Android
fast and easy using our favorite thumbnail design apps
for Android right now,
including how do I upload it to YouTube when you're done.
Hey it's Justin Brown here from Primal Video,
where we help you grow an audience
and scale your revenue with online video.
If you're new here,
make sure you click that subscribe button
and all to everything I mentioned in this video,
you can find the link in the description box below.
So let's jump into it.
So smart phones are an awesome tool
for mobile video creation.
And right apps, you can easily create YouTube thumbnails
on your Android phone or tablet.
Meaning that you can actually shoot, edit, upload
and release YouTube videos
without leaving your Android device.
So right now we're gonna run through exactly how to do it.
from designing a custom thumbnail for your new video
to thumbnail upload in the YouTube app,
all on your Android device,
including the best design app that we've found on Android
to get it all done quick and easy.
And once we're done,
I'll even hook you up with our free step-by-step guide
that you can download to level up your Android video game
next time you're shooting your videos as well.
Okay, so getting to the apps we have tried and tested
an absolute ton of them.
And our topic right now for Thumbnail Creation on Android
does go to PixelLab.
This is an amazing app,
there are so many features
and so much control that you have
over your thumbnail creation in here,
but it's not too overwhelming
for someone who is an absolute beginner to jump in as well.
And you can use it and get great results
with just the free version of this app.
Yes there are some ads,
and yes, you can pay to remove the ads,
but even just using the free version with ads,
you're gonna get great results.
Now just before we jump into the app,
the first thing that we need to do
is to capture a few photos
for us to use in our thumbnail creation.
So if have you seen any of our Primal Video thumbnails,
you'll know that they've all got my face on them somewhere,
either smiling or pointing at something
or holding up the product or the tool
that we're going to be mentioning in the video
and all of this is to help people understand
what the video is about
by holding up that tool or that product,
and also to keep the branding consistent
across all of our videos.
So they'll all have my face on them,
they'll all have some text,
three to five words, usually big, bold text.
So again, it's easy for people to understand
what the video is about,
and where it's relevant we'll also include any pictures
or logos or anything to help convey what the video is about
to our potential viewers.
So with the photos or the images
that we capture to use in our thumbnails,
I normally just do it at the time of recording,
like here now,
I'll just move across to the side,
and I would just smile and point at stuff
or pull silly faces, I'm I thinking about something,
which is the best video editing software?
I'd put some silly faces, silly poses,
just to give us a few different options,
when get to creating our thumbnails.
Okay, so here we are in PixelLab,
and this is what you'll see when you first open it up.
And then on the bottom,
you've got some presets and templates
and things that you can use.
So if there's something you like to look of
already down here,
then that could be the starting place for you.
But for us we're gonna go to default
and we're gonna customize this up from scratch.
Okay so first off,
we're gonna get the size of the image right.
So if you come up the top here to the three dots,
the settings button, and then come down to image size.
So we're gonna hit this presets for all sorts of things,
including a YouTube thumbnail,
but what I'll suggest
is that we actually are at the resolution of this
to be 1920 by 1080.
So this is still gonna work for YouTube,
it's still gonna be the same aspect ratio,
but it's gonna give us a higher quality image
at the end of it.
So we're going to go to okay.
And you can see now that we have a wide screen area
to create our thumbnail image in.
So first off let's add in the text
that we wanna include on our thumbnail here.
So you can see we've already got a text box here,
let's double tap on that
and let's replace the text with thumbnails.
And go okay.
Now with that selected, if we come down the bottom to the A,
and then down the bottom here,
you've got a heap of different ways
that you can customize this up.
So let's customize up first the font
to get that looking something like a Primal Video font.
And we go meme font, that will do, and go okay.
Now if you're after a specific font to match your branding,
then you can upload your own custom fonts into here as well.
Okay so we've got our font now,
normally on our Primal Video text we have a background.
So we'll come across here to background.
Let's enable that.
And we can choose a static color or we can go a gradient.
Let's go a static color.
Now when we swipe down on this,
we can customize that up.
So we can choose one of their preset colors here,
and we can swipe across to pick different ones
or we can hit the plus.
So if there is a specific code
for the color that you wanna use or RGB values,
then you can enter those in up the top here,
or you can pick a color
from the massive color wheel in here as well.
So in this case here, I'm just gonna go with a dark gray
and go okay.
Now if we keep scrolling down here,
we can customize up this background or this box
by adjusting the padding.
So maybe we'll add a little bit more on the left,
and a little bit more on the right,
and maybe we'll take some off the top and the bottom.
Okay, so that's looking pretty good.
So we hit the tick on that.
So we've got one text block in here already.
Now to save us creating the next one again from scratch,
we can actually just duplicate this one
by selecting it and coming across to copy,
and that way we have created one
that is an exact copy of the first one we created.
The other thing you can do that's really cool in here
is you can save these as a style.
So if we come over here to styles,
then we can actually save this,
and it says, "Yes, save the current style as a new style,"
go okay.
And this way if you're coming back
to create more thumbnails at a later date,
then you can just go to styles,
then you can browse your styles,
then you can pick all of your presets in here
so that you don't need to recreate them each time.
So let's customize up this second one here,
let's double tap on it.
Just go on Android and go okay.
Now for this one here, let's change the background color.
So let's go over to background and scroll down
and with the plus, let's go to make it a blue color,
something like that.
And we'll hit the tick for that one to apply that.
And let's duplicate that or copy that one more time.
So we'll come back across here to copy
and edit this last one here to say updated,
with an exclamation mark so everyone knows where serious.
Okay, go okay.
And for this one,
let's make this one here background color.
Let's make this a red.
And we will go, okay.
Now this one here, I'm gonna make it a little bit smaller.
The text isn't as important for updated,
and hit the tick.
Now it looks like we need to adjust
the padding on that background again.
So it's come across to background,
scroll down to the padding for the top and the bottom.
Let's make sure that's even.
So let's move these over to the side here now.
And what we'll do with a lot of our titles
is just rotate them a little bit,
so they're not just straight titles.
So to do that, there's a little semicircle under the title.
So if we press on that,
and we can rotate that around from there
to where we'd like it,
or you with the title selected,
you can come down to the bottom here to rotate
and you can get more granular control over that.
So let's try that one there, one above it, and rotate,
and the one above it let's get it the other way
just to break it up a little bit.
Okay now let's bring in the image that we took
while we were filming to use in this graphic.
So for that we wanna come up to the plus at the top
and let's choose from gallery, go and find your image.
I'm going to crop our image down,
so that it's just the pieces that we want
without anything extra in there.
And I'm going to hit okay or the tick on that one.
And then with the image selected,
I'm then gonna come across down the bottom here.
Now there's actually a few different ways
that you can do this in this app.
If you've just got a solid color behind you,
then you can just use the arrays color tool.
And let's enable that.
And then we can go and pick the color that you want
using the color pickup.
Says pick your color.
It's primarily that white creamy color,
we can select okay.
And that's done a pretty good job
at removing a fair amount of that color.
There are some other controls in here to dial that in,
but this is really what you would use
if you had your photo or your image
taken on a green screen or a blue screen.
So we're gonna turn that one off now
and cancel out of that.
In this case where a lot of that background wasn't removed,
we are going to have to use the eraser tool.
And in here is where we can draw out
and remove the background from our image.
Now just by grabbing the eraser tool at the top here,
we can start to draw on our image
and you can see it is being removed.
Now we have the option to make this bigger
using the slider here
so that we're able to remove a greater area of this.
Keep in mind that we have also cropped off
this section of the image.
So removing this piece over here,
isn't really that important.
So we can use this eraser tool
to get pretty close to the area that we want to get rid of.
If we wanna feather this out so it's not such a hard edge,
then we can soften that off with the other tool here too.
If you wanna zoom in,
we can press the plus button at the top here
and then pinch to zoom on the image,
which is what I recommend that you do,
if you wanna get a really high quality cut out
of your bag background.
So turn off zoom, so we can keep going with that eraser tool
and remove now that we're zoomed in
at a greater level of accuracy just like this.
So this is the main way that I'd probably be doing it.
When you get to an area here
where you need some more granular control,
make your brush or your razor a little bit smaller,
and then come back into those areas there
to remove those sections.
So you're just making it
bigger or smaller as you need to,
make it a really small for this section in here,
but I'm also just keeping an eye
on that little preview monitor up the top corner,
showing me how close I am to the edge.
So it's really not too much of a tedious process.
It's actually quite easy to get through your image here
and to have quite a good cutout.
And the other tool that you got access to in here
is the laser tool.
So if we select on the laser tool here at the top,
then we're able to free draw out,
or draw around the area
that we'd like to have removed from our image.
So you can see again we're looking at that preview
down the bottom right hand corner,
and I'm just drawing around my ear here,
again just going through this relatively quickly.
And so you want to be fairly accurate with this,
but you don't need to be 100% spot on.
Let's just say that's it.
To remove that cut out from there
we'll press the little removal button here
and we've now removed that section.
So we can now clean that up with the eraser tool,
zoom back out, grab the eraser tool
and we can now remove the remaining areas
now that the finer detail piece around my head
has actually happened, or has actually been removed.
So once you're done just hit the plus button,
and you can see that we've cropped out that image.
So really, really easy
and I did get through that pretty quick.
So you can see the result
or the effect that you're able to get here.
So now that you've got that cut out,
you can do things like add a white border
or a border around that cutout,
and maybe increase the width of it.
So I've used that look for a lot of our thumbnails,
or we can turn that off, cancel out of that.
You could come across and add a shadow to it.
And you might go a darker color here,
actually the white looked better.
So there's some really cool do you use tools in here
to allow you to get a great amount of control
over your images.
So apply that now.
Okay so now that we've got that in there,
maybe we'll brighten this up a little bit.
It's got color filters and brightness,
brighten that up a bit and hit the tick to apply that,
it's maybe move me off to the side a bit more,
it's reposition some of our text here.
Maybe our text here is a bit big now.
Okay so that's not looking too bad.
Let's bring in some other graphics.
Now, obviously we're talking about YouTube thumbnails here,
so let's bring in the YouTube logo.
So for this we're gonna head over to Google,
search for YouTube logo.
And normally what I would do here is just go to images
and then find the one usually from Wikipedia,
which is right over here.
But in this case, if we come back over here to All
and go down here,
you can see that YouTube actually releases
their brand resources.
So their logos and stuff publicly.
Now it does say here though
that while this page is here to get you started,
all uses need to be approved by YouTube.
Now I would think that we're probably okay
using the YouTube logo in our logo on YouTube
to help someone make YouTube thumbnails.
It's pretty meta,
but general disclaimer is used at your own risk.
So I'm gonna go ahead and download this one here now.
Once we've got that downloaded,
we'll come back over to PixelLab,
press the plus and let's choose from gallery.
Let's select the YouTube logo, hit the tick to drop it in.
And we now have that here in our thumbnail,
which we can reposition.
So let's put it over here somewhere.
YouTube thumbnails on Android,
reposition some of these.
Now because we're talking specifically for Android here,
we might bring in an Android logo.
So again we'll jump back over to Chrome.
We find the image we wanna use, save that to our device.
Come back to PixelLab, hit the plus.
From gallery, find the logo, we will crop this one down,
hit the tick, scale it down in the bottom here.
Okay we're getting pretty close now.
We're just gonna hit the save button
to make sure that we are saving our project.
We're going to save it as a project that's called thumb,
just in case something happened.
Now because this thumbnail image
is about creating thumbnail images,
why don't we add in a couple of thumbnail images
as examples.
So let's head over to YouTube,
let's open up our channel, let's go to videos,
and now let's take a screenshot of this.
Now back in PixelLab,
let's import that screenshot from gallery,
pick our screenshot,
but let's crop it down
so we're just grabbing one thumbnail image at a time.
Now obviously these here are going to be pretty small.
So the quality isn't going to be great on them,
but at the same time, we don't need them to be great quality
because they're only gonna be used very small.
So I've selected that, hit okay.
It's probably even still too big at that point.
Let's the shrink it down a bit more to put it here,
maybe we'll rotate it a little bit.
We couldn't even come across here
and add a little border on it stroke.
Let's enable stroke to make it white,
hit the tick,
you can see we've got a little outline on that now.
And let's bring in another one,
hit the plus from gallery back to our screenshot.
Let's crop it down for another one and shrink it down.
Again let's apply that stroke, there it is,
turn it on, tick.
And maybe we'll add in one more, shrink down.
Let's put this one down here.
Let's rotate it a little bit.
Let's put a stroke on this one.
Now you can see that those three that we've just added in,
are sitting on top of that picture of me.
So let's come up here to the layers again,
and let's move the cutout of me up to the top,
turn off layers.
And you can see now
that those thumbnails that were just added
are sitting in behind me.
Now as for the background that we've done nothing with yet,
let's just create a simple gradient
or a simple color that we can use in the background there.
So it's not just the stock one on here.
So I'm gonna come up to the top here to the plus,
let's just choose a shape
and you get the default white shape here.
Let's make it bigger,
so it fills out area here.
Let's scroll down here to where it says fill color,
let's go gradient.
And you can see that we're able to create different gradient
or different looks in here.
And there are some presets in here as well.
So even that one there could be okay.
But obviously we can customize these up in here as well
with the different colors and things.
But that's not too bad.
Let's hit okay with that one,
again and come up to the layers.
Let's move that one right to the bottom.
So down below everything and hide the layers,
and you can see now we have a light blue on one side
getting to a darker blue on the other side.
So you can feel free to customize this up.
Again reposition everything if you need to, tweak it,
make minor adjustments until you're happy with it.
But I think that looks pretty good.
So from here let's save this out
and upload this to our YouTube channel.
So we wanna hit the save button again,
let's go save as project again,
just in case we need to make any changes to this, thumb v2.
Now we hit save again and choose save as an image.
Now the settings here
should all be exactly as you need them.
You want it as a JPEG.
The size is correct,
if you'd entered it at the start like we did.
So now you just need to hit save to gallery.
Now you're trying to head over to the YouTube Studio app
to add this to your video.
Come up to the top, open up videos,
let's select this video here, "World's Best Video,"
the one here without a thumbnail image added,
hit on the little edit button at the top, the pencil,
and then in the top left corner
of the thumbnail picture there,
we wanna hit edit on that, select Custom Thumbnail,
you're gonna select you on your masterpiece,
and hit select again
and make sure you hit save in the top right hand corner.
And that new thumbnail image is now applied
and saved on your YouTube video.
So now that you've got an awesome looking thumbnail,
let's make sure that you're getting the best results
out of your Android camera
the next time you're filming.
So linked on screen is a video
running through our top tips for filming with Android.
And also a link to download our free PDF guide
to help you film amazing videos
just using your Android device.
So you can grab your copy
and follow along next time you're shooting your videos.
I'll see you in the next one.