- [Instructor] I'm gonna show you how to make
a YouTube thumbnail on your Android phone,
and we're starting right now.
The first thing you wanna do
is you wanna install an application
called PixelLab.
You can get that for free on the Google Play Store.
Once you have that installed,
you wanna click on the icon to open it up.
When you first open this app up,
you are going to see that it is a square ratio canvas
that they give you.
You want to change this to something more YouTube friendly
by going up to the top right,
you're gonna see three little dots,
you wanna click on those.
Then, you're gonna see image size.
You wanna click on image size,
and you want to choose from the preset options.
You want to go down to YouTube thumbnail.
Now, this is gonna give you
the YouTube recommended 1280 by 720 size.
Personally, I like to make my thumbnails
at 1920 by 1080, so that I have an online archive,
but for this particular tutorial,
we're gonna keep it at 1280 by 720
because that's what YouTube recommends.
Once you have your dimensions in place,
whatever you choose, then you just click OK.
The next thing you wanna do
is you want to add an image to this,
so that you can build your text around it.
So, what we're gonna do is
we're gonna click on the plus icon,
then we're gonna go into our gallery,
then we're gonna pick any picture
that would work for our thumbnail.
What you're gonna see here, once you have an image chosen,
is it's going to give a 16 by nine ratio box
around you image.
This is gonna be your crop space.
So, you wanna grab a corner of this
and you want to scale it down
to use use whatever part of the image that you would like.
Here, because I like to have my face big on the right,
and my text over to the left,
I leave enough room here in the picture to do that,
and I put my face over here, to the right,
with an eye on the third,
so that everything ends up in the end nice and balanced,
and then once that's finished,
I'm gonna click the check mark.
Once this is imported into the app,
all I have to do is click here, in the corner,
and drag that out.
Now, something that you're gonna wanna do
is, when you are building text on this later,
if you don't lock this image into place,
then you're gonna accidentally hit it a ton of times.
I figured that out the hard way
when learning to use this app, initially.
So, what you do to lock it
is you go into your layers,
and first thing you wanna do
is you wanna click the lock tab.
Now, that's gonna keep you from moving anything here.
But, you want to still move this down underneath
that initial text layer that is in there by default.
Once that is finished, then all you have to do
is click on the layer icon again,
and that's gonna go away
and you're still gonna see that text layer there.
So, what we're gonna do is we're gonna grab that text layer,
we're gonna move it up here,
and just to show you guys an example.
I can do anything I want with this picture
and it's not gonna move,
it's gonna stay in place.
So, I'm gonna click on this text up here on the top,
and then, I'm going to click on the A icon
down here on the bottom,
and this is gonna open up a whole bunch
of different options for you
of things you can do with the text.
So, it's gonna give you style options,
you can actually edit the text,
you can delete it, copy it,
you can move it into a particular position,
change the size, the color,
make 3D protrusions on it.
I mean, pretty much anything you want.
Add drop shadows, strokes, anything that you wanna do
to make your text stand out.
So, what I'm going to do
is I'm going to go up into the styles,
and I'm gonna click on that icon,
and I'm gonna go into browse.
Because I like my thumbnails to be nice and bold,
I'm going to grab the nice text
that is standing out to me right now,
which is right here at in the bottom right,
and it automatically applied that
to my text layer.
So, now I need to change what it's actually going to say.
So, I'm going to click on the edit icon over here,
and then I'm going to change this
to whatever text it is
that I'm going to use in my thumbnail.
Once you choose the actual text
while this dialog box is still open here,
if you look up here in the top left,
you're gonna see a big T and a little T.
If you click on that,
then it'll make your word all caps,
or if you click on it again, it'll make it all lowercase.
So for this example, I'm gonna keep everything as caps.
I'm gonna click OK.
Now, what I wanna do, is I'm going to go down,
in all of these options that I have,
I'm gonna click on the size icon,
and I'm going to make this big
because, you know, people are on mobile phones these days.
I want them to be able to read this quickly
and easily at a glance.
So, I'm going to get my size together,
and as you can see, I adjusted it a little bit
to make sure that my size is how I want it.
Then, I'm gonna click the check mark
to make sure that everything stays how I want it.
The next thing I'm going to do
is I'm going to scroll down through my options,
and I'm going to choose
the shadow option,
and the reason I'm gonna do this
is because I want my text
to come off of my picture a little bit.
So, I'm going to expand the blur radius.
I'm going to expand the offset,
and as you can see,
it's starting to put that shadow behind my text.
I'm going to spread this out a little bit more.
Once I have it how I want,
I'm going to click on the check mark,
and then that says that is basically
how I want my thumb to look.
So, I'm going to do this for the two other layers
of text that I'm going to put on here.
Since we already walked through that,
I'm going to speed through this part.
(fast hip hop music)
Okay, so as you can see here,
I have the text in place
that I will actually want to use in this thumbnail.
So, what I'm going to do next
is I'm going to just show you some of the other options,
so you can see what is available
on some of the possibilities with this.
If you want to rotate your text,
you just click on the rotate icon,
and you can rotate the text a little bit
to kinda make everything a little bit offset,
kind of like I do in my thumbnails.
You can also change the style, of course,
to italic or bold, or however it is
that you want to make your thumbnails look.
You can also add an actual background to your text as well,
which is pretty cool.
You just click on the background option,
you enable it,
and then you will see that pop up.
Now, I'm going to change this to black,
and I'm going to change the padding on here to,
basically the idea is to make it
just kinda fit around my text
so that it compliments it,
and helps it stand out.
Another option they have, of course, is you can go in
and you can change the color on all of the stuff.
To do that, you click on the color icon,
and then you can click on any color that you want.
And, another really cool option that they have in here,
that I was pretty impressed with,
is they also have 3D rotation.
So, if you want to, you know,
give your text a little bit of a tweak,
and spend a little bit of some time on it,
and make everything really stand out
as far as making it grab attention.
You can easily do that with this app.
Just be careful not to junk it up too much,
because you want it to be nice and clean
and easy to read, and not a total mess.
So, be really careful,
if you don't have any design experience,
not to junk up your thumbnails.
You want everything as crisp and clear
and easy to read as possible.
Now, as another option,
in addition to the background that I showed you before,
you can also add shape layers to this
by clicking on the shape layer.
Then, you would go in and you would do,
let's say a rectangle,
if we wanted it to look something like my thumbs,
and you just position this,
and then, as you can see,
what you might run into here,
is that if you're doing something like this,
the shape layer is gonna be on top.
All you have to do for that, once you hit that check mark,
is you can actually go into the layers option,
and you can grab it, and you can just pull it down
underneath whatever words you want it to be under.
Just make sure that it's on top of your picture.
So, you know, you could do something like that
if you wanted to, or let's say in that situation,
let's say instead, we wanted it to be red or black
so it stands out just a little bit more.
You know, this gives you the creative freedom
to be able to do that if you want.
It also lets you adjust the size perfectly
within the app, as well, to where you can make it wider
or you can make it taller.
You can do pretty much anything that you want.
I mean, this is a fantastic app
for making thumbnails on the go.
Once you have your thumb all worked out,
and everything looks exactly how you want it to look,
in order to export this,
you wanna click on the three dots up here in the top right,
and then all you have to do is click on export image,
and it's going to ask you what your file format is.
You can use JPG if you want.
You can also have the option for PNG,
which is a bigger file size, it's less compression.
Then, you choose your actual size that you want.
Since we made this is a 1280 by 720,
then I'm going to export it at 1280 by 720,
but you can change these to any dimensions
that you like.
Then, once you have all of that worked out,
then you just click save to gallery,
and that thumbnail is now in your gallery,
and you can actually upload this now,
into the YouTube Creator Studio app.
If you learned anything in the video,
remember to leave a like,
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Thank you so much for watching.
I'll see you next time.