One of the first things you need to do when you create a new youtube channel is to add a profile
image and upload some banner artwork there are two ways to access these first you can simply
roll over the profile image and banner image on your channel page and provided you're logged
in you'll get an option to upload a new image the other way to get there is to click on the
customize channel page click on the customization tab which is on the left hand side of your screen
then click on the branding tab in the mid section of the screen the profile image is really easy
all you need to do is upload a square image that is larger than 98 pixels by 98 pixels 800 pixels
is recommended and this can be a png gif or jpeg image whether you're uploading a portrait image
or logo the only thing you really need to look out for is that you have enough breathing space
around the edges so that none of the essential content is cropped in the circular format that
is provided the banner image is the next thing you want to add and this is where we're going to spend
all the time in this tutorial at first glance it looks pretty straightforward the requirements are
that you upload an image that is 2048 pixels by 1152 pixels in dimensions and less than six
megabytes in size but you also need to be aware of how the banner will appear on different devices
from a tv to a laptop or computer and to mobile phones and tablets so to help out with that i've
created a template which you can download for free and i'll leave a link to that in the description
box below to use the template simply open it up in your favorite image editor and add your artwork
over the top you can use photoshop affinity photo or illustrator if you're on a desktop computer if
you have only a mobile phone you can use photoshop mix which is available as a free download or apple
keynote if you have an iphone i'm going to be using affinity photo on my imac which is a great
piece of software that you can get for around 50 as a one-off purchase it's a lot like photoshop
but without that ongoing monthly fee so to get started i'll open up a new document and import my
template image so i've got affinity open with the complete layout visible and this is what our end
result is going to be i'm going to take away those layers so we can go through each step at a time
and see how i built this composition and how i got it to conform to the layout requirements of the
youtube banner artwork so i've dragged the layout template onto the bottom layer of affinity photo
here and i've also imported all of my graphics already when you're starting out from scratch
simply drag images onto the canvas or use the file place option to place your images onto the
affinity photo canvas the first thing we'll take a look at is the background element which is this
kind of abstract neon image now if i change the opacity slider at the top and make that about
50 percent this kind of gives you a sense of where that background will fall into place in terms of
the greater composition i want to make sure that this inverted pyramid is visible at the right size
at the center of the safe area box which is in the middle here so that looks about right to me i'm
gonna go back and put that to a hundred percent opacity now i'm going to start adding some graphic
elements i've got an image of an imac which i've contoured out i've got a portrait of myself which
is already being contoured and i'll show you how to do that in just a moment i've got some text on
the side we've got my logo on the left hand side we've got a microphone an ipad a couple of iphones
and just to complete the composition and make it look a little bit more final i've placed a white
line across the base of the portrait image and the hands coming off the iphones and that pretty much
demonstrates how i want my banner to appear now i'm just going to drag my guides layer to the top
i'm just going to go to the view menu at the top select show rulers and then i'm going to drag some
guides down so that i can see my safe areas more clearly when i'm looking at the final composition
so now that i've done that i'm going to hide the guys layer yet again and you can see that these
blue guidelines remain visible over the top of my graphic elements and i can see this safe area here
in the midsection is what most users will see when they're looking at my channel on a mobile phone
and this section here from left to right all the way across up and down here that anyone viewing
my channel art on a desktop computer will see and then anyone with a large tv screen will
potentially see some of this background element that bleeds out beyond the main compositional
area so it really does depend on the device that they're viewing the channel on as to
how much of your composition they'll see so you need to carefully construct your composition so
that all of the essential elements are visible in this safe area and then we have a bit of an extra
section for those on desktop computers on the left and right here and then the remainder is for those
viewing on large tv screens so that's how i put together my latest banner for my youtube channel
now i know some of you are going to be asking how i created this outline around my portrait image so
in this bonus section i'm going to quickly show you how i used affinity photo to create a cutout
of my portrait so in order to do that i'm going to hide the existing cutout that i've already created
and i'm going to place the original photo that i took into the canvas so this is just a basic
portrait that i took with my canon eos camera so in order to create my cutout i'm going to
use the selection brush tool and the first thing i'm going to do is click on my face
now i'm going to change the size of my selection a little bit and i'm going to keep clicking
over the image and it will continue to mark out the selection and separate the portrait from
the background and this is quite a difficult image because i've got this band that appears
above my head for the headphones which is rather quite thin so i'm not going to be able to do this
in a single step if you've just got a basic portrait without those headphones it would
have already been complete and you just click on the mask and you've pretty much created your
cutout but in this example we're going to have to create some refinements around this mask so that
i can get the headphones in so i'm just going to do a quick selection around the headphones
and then we're going to go back in and tidy that up once i've made my selection
and now i'll zoom in so we can get a closer look
and then i'll click on the selection brush tool again and this time we're going to make the width
a little bit smaller so that i have more control over my selection
make sure that everything that i want to be selected has been clicked on i can see i'm missing
some of the eight here so i'll go and select that some of this top not been selected so we'll go and
paint over that so now i'm going to go over to the mode icon and select subtract to subtract
from that selection where we've gone a little bit too far
that headphone band is proving to be quite complicated so i'm just going to
paint that whole section in including the white area in between the headphone band and the top
of my hair and we'll take care of that section with a another selection method in just a moment
so once you've made your selection you can click on the mask tool on the bottom
left hand corner of the layers window and that will create your mask for you now as you can see
it's a little bit rough around the edges and we've got some areas that we have to work on here around
the headphone still so to make the edges a little bit softer i'll undo that and we'll go to select
refine edges
and we'll add a little bit of a feathering
we'll smooth out the lines a little bit
and maybe change the border width to about eight percent a little bit smoother and
we can now apply that click the mask again and as you can see if i hold down command d to deselect
it we have a pretty smooth cutout that we can use for our banner and now in the final part of my out
i'm just going to use the flood select tool to get rid of some of this white within the headphones
and that will do quite nicely
and if i reduce that in size now that's pretty good all that remains to do now is we're not
going to use this section here so i'm going to cut that out now i'm going to drag it into place
and grab one of the corners hold down the capital lock key on the keyboard so that i
get a consistent scale and i'll scale the image down to size drag it into the center position
and we'll make sure the microphone is over the top so we'll drag it down in order
in the layers window underneath the microphone
and that's looking pretty good and then the final thing i want to show you is how
to create an outline around the portrait so to do that i'm going to click on the portrait layer
and if you're on a mac hold down the command key and click on it at the same time if you're
on a windows computer hold down the windows key and then i'm going to create a new layer
by clicking on the layer icon in the bottom set of icons in the layers window
and now we're going to fill that pixel layer with a block color but before we do that we're going to
expand our pixel selection we'll go to select grow shrink and we're going to grow it by two pixels
then we're going to go to edit and fill and fill it with our chosen color you can select
any color you like here on the color wheel but i'll stay with this kind of light blue tone for
now click apply and we'll drag that underneath the portrait image and we've now got an outline
around the portrait and if you like you can add a bit of a blur around that line so it's not such a
sharp edge by going to the filters option blur gaussian blur and just using a very small 2.9
to maybe 5.5 pixel blur i'm just going to turn the layer on and off so we can see the difference of
the portrait as it is by itself and now with the blue outline applied i think it really adds value
to the look of the portrait and it certainly is consistent with that kind of fluoro neon theme
that i've got going on in this particular artwork so that's how i put together my youtube banner
channel artwork by using this template layout if you want to get access to the
template it's totally free to download and i'll leave a link to it in the description box below
thanks for watching hopefully you found this information helpful if you did feel free to
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feel free to put them in the comments box below see on the next one bye for now