- In this video, I'll show you
how to make a YouTube thumbnail on iPhone
using our top recommended thumbnail design apps right now
from end-to-end,
including how to add 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 the links to everything we mention in this video,
you can find linked in the description box below.
So let's jump into it.
iPhones are an amazing tool for video creation.
You can shoot, edit and upload your videos
all on your iPhone.
And with some simple thumbnail design apps,
you can get an awesome thumbnail created
right on that iPhone as well.
So, right now we're gonna walk through that whole process,
from designing a custom thumbnail for your new video
to thumbnail upload in the YouTube app,
all on your iPhone or iPad.
Okay, so starting off with the apps.
There is a lot of different options out there for apps
and we have tried and tested an absolute ton of them,
but my topic right now goes to Phonto.
This is an amazing app with lots of features
and lots of control in there,
and also, it makes it really easy
for you to create your thumbnails too.
Now, just before we jump over into the app,
the first thing that we'll need to do
is to capture some sort of photo or image
that we can use in our thumbnail creation.
So if you've seen any of our other Primal Video thumbnails,
you'll know that there is a photo of me
on pretty much all of them,
and I made either smiling or pointing
or pulling some silly face
or holding up a product or a tool
that we're going to be mentioning
that's related to that video.
So there's two main reasons that we do that.
The first one is to try and grab people's attention
with our thumbnails,
by having me on there pulling a silly face
or pointing at something,
but also to build a level of consistency
or familiarity in the branding.
So, all of our thumbnail images will have me on them.
They'll also have some sort of text,
three to five words usually, and really big bold text,
and if we're mentioning any sort of product
or service or company,
then we'll usually include an image or a graphic
related to that
to help people understand that this video
is the one for them to click on.
So you'll need to grab a photo first,
and for me, I actually do it while I'm filming my video.
So at the end of recording the videos,
I'll leave the camera recording,
and I'll just move over to the side
to somewhere on the edge of the shot,
and I'll be smiling and pointing and pulling silly faces
and those sorts of things,
just to give us some options
when we get to creating our thumbnails,
so we've not just got one option
and trying to make that work.
Okay, so here we are in Phonto.
This is what you'll see when you first open up the app.
So what we're going to do is come down to the camera
down the bottom and select Plain Images.
Now, from here, just select the white box
in the top right-hand corner,
come up to the top where it's got the image size,
2048 by 2048, press on that and we're going to go Custom,
and we're going to type in 1920 by 1080,
which is our size for our YouTube thumbnail.
Now straightaway, down the bottom here, you can add a color.
Now, obviously, we're starting with white here
but you can change the color down the bottom
by pressing on Color.
So you can just pick the main color
that you want your thumbnail to be based or built upon,
or you can even create some simple gradients
or effects in here by selecting multiple colors.
So let's say for the first color here,
we're going to go a lighter purple
and next color across here, we might choose darker purple,
and then the third color here,
we might go more of a light blue color.
We can adjust the sliders and things down the bottom here
to customize this up, and if we press up at the top
where it says Vertical,
then we can change how this is going to look.
So at the moment, I've got a vertical gradient.
We can switch it to a horizontal gradient
so it's bright around one side, darker on the other.
There's just some simple tools and settings in here
that you can use
to create some pretty cool background effects
before we even get into creating our actual thumbnail image.
Okay, so it's something that will work for this thumbnail.
So we'll just hit Apply to save that,
and then we want to hit the share button
in the top right-hand corner, and let's choose Use.
So you can see our work area
or our canvas area now for our thumbnail
is that colored section.
The black area around the outside,
that's just workspace where you could put text or graphics,
but only anything inside of that rectangle area
is what's going to save out as your thumbnail image.
Okay, so we're going to go ahead now and add some text in.
So just tap anywhere on the black area,
and then let's go Add Text.
So I'm gonna type in "THUMBNAIL", and we'll hit Done.
We have the word thumbnail,
we can pick it up, we can move it around.
If we tap on it, we get this little menu that pops up.
So we can edit the text, what it says,
we can change the size, the font,
the tilt or the rotation of it, adjust the styling,
we can get some granular movement under Move.
If we swipe across,
we've got some more settings and things in here as well.
So, let's jump across to Font.
You will want to make sure that the fonts that you're using
are the ones that match your branding.
So for us, we've got Oswald Bold here,
'cause that's what we use
for all of our Primal Video thumbnails.
So we can select that.
Next, we'll come across to Style
and we'll add a background color on this.
So, I'm going to go to Background
and I'm going to choose a dark gray,
and you can see that we've now got a box
around the outside of our text.
Now, if we want to customize up this background,
we can come down the bottom here,
you can see we can adjust the width of that box,
we can adjust the height of that box,
so I might make it a little bit taller there,
and then we can hit Done.
So we have one word in, thumbnail.
Now, instead of just creating
the next set of text again from scratch,
we can actually just duplicate this one that we've created.
So, press on that, swipe across, and just press duplicate.
And we now have a second version of it.
Let's move that across here,
and let's go to Text, remove that one
and let's go "ON IPHONE", and we'll hit Done.
So you can see,
it's the exact same style as the first one we created.
So let's change the background color on this one.
So let's just go to Style, Background.
Now, with the colors, we can manually adjust the colors here
using these sliders,
or if you come into the little menu button
next to the red colors there,
then you can actually save your preset colors
for your branding in here.
So you can see we've got Primal Video blue there.
Or if we hit the little edit button,
you can actually key in the HEX value or the RGB values
for a specific color.
So I'm just going to go ahead
and select our Primal Video blue for that one, and hit Done.
And we'll duplicate this one more time
with the duplicate button.
And we'll edit the text,
and let's write "UPDATED!", with an exclamation mark,
so everyone knows we're serious, (giggles) and hit Done.
So now for this one, let's change the background color.
So we'll go to Style, Background,
and let's make the background red.
Maybe we'll make it a bit brighter red,
and that's looking pretty good.
We hit Done on that one.
Okay, so we've got three main pieces of text in here,
they're all on individual layers,
we can pick them up, we can move them around,
we can move them off the thumbnail for now, if we want to,
while we're getting all the graphics and things in
that we want to use,
but that's how easy it is to add in some text.
Now, because we are talking about YouTube thumbnails here,
then we will likely want to bring in the YouTube logo.
So, I'm gonna go across now to my web browser
and grab a logo.
So let's search for "YouTube logo".
Now here, I'd normally just go to IMAGES,
find the image that I want to use,
normally from something like Wikipedia,
so that you are actually able to use this image
in most cases, in your own thumbnail image.
But in this case, if we come back over to ALL
and we scroll down a little bit,
then YouTube actually does provide their brand resources,
their logos and things, for people to use.
Now, it does does say on this page,
"While this page is here to get you started,
"all uses need to be approved by YouTube."
I think in this case, where we're creating a video
or a tutorial for YouTube that's only going to YouTube,
it should be pretty fine using their logo in this.
But obviously take that into consideration
for your own thumbnails and any graphics you are creating.
So, we're going to download here this version of their logo.
Once that's done, I'll go back over to Phonto,
hit the menu button down the bottom down left-hand corner
and let's go Add Image,
go through and find that one,
it's the one up here, and hit Done.
And we now have the YouTube logo in there as well.
So let's start to lay these out where we'd like them.
Let's make this a bit bigger.
Tap on it, let's go Size and let's scale that up.
So let's go "YouTube, THUMBNAIL, ON IPHONE, UPDATED!".
Now, for this "UPDATED!" here,
maybe we can make that text a little bit smaller.
So let's go Size, and let's use the little minus button here
to drop that down in size.
It's not as important compared to the rest of the text.
And we also might want to add a little bit of angle to it
just so it stands out a bit more, that's all.
Tilt that down a little bit
and now let's pick it up and move it back in here.
So we can move things around here
just to get them looking the way that we might like for now.
And the next thing we're gonna do
is to bring in the photo that we took while we were filming
to be used in this image.
So, I'm gonna go to the menu, let's go to Add Image
and let's bring in that photo.
Now, if you want to crop or adjust this image,
it does need to be done here before you actually hit Done
and bring it into your project.
So we're just going to hit on the little square
down the bottom, and I'm going to adjust this slider
'cause I still want it to come in as widescreen,
so you can adjust the crop here.
And then we can use the pinch to zoom on the image,
and we can reposition it to where we'd like it.
So I'm going to move myself off to the left-hand side,
so that I can have text on the right-hand side,
'cause I'm just moving it around
to where I think it might look good.
Now we can come back and readjust
or reimport this if we need to,
but that's looking pretty good.
I'm gonna go Done.
And it does come in really, really small, once again.
So you want to select on it, let's go to Size
and let's scale this up
and let's position it on our thumbnail image here.
Now, you might have noticed
that the YouTube logo has now disappeared.
We're going to move this out of the way to select on that,
and when you tap on it,
it actually brings it back on top of our image here.
So, let's move that image back into position here,
maybe somewhere around them,
and now that that's in, we can readjust any of our text,
to move it around so that it makes sense
and so that it looks good for this image.
So, that's looking pretty good but we haven't finished yet,
but one question that we do get asked quite a lot
is how can we remove the background from our images
or how do we cut ourselves out of the background
to have a transparent image.
I will show you that, there is a time code on-screen now.
Jump forward to that time if you want to see that process,
but we will be there really, really soon.
I'll just show you how you can finish this off
and make this look a little bit better
so that we can still read that YouTube text there on-screen.
Okay, so what I'll probably do in this case then
is come down to menu and add in another item,
and let's choose a box.
So this is just a square box, select that.
We can adjust the color of it, if we'd like to,
but for now let's just adjust the size.
So I'll probably make it a little bit wider,
I would definitely make it higher,
maybe a little bit wider again.
And what we want to do is position this up behind here,
you may wanna tap on that YouTube logo
to bring it back to the front.
I'm going to position it off to the side here,
but not just as a hard angle like that
or a hard block like that,
we're going to position it around here.
Let's tap on it, let's go to Tilt,
and let's put a little bit of an angle on this
just to break it up a bit more.
And the other thing I would probably do here as well
is to tap on that, and under Color,
down the bottom is Alpha,
which is the level of transparency.
So we can actually fade this out a bit
so that we're still able to see some of the background
through it.
So maybe let's try 0.8,
and maybe we'll make this a bit darker blue,
see what that looks like.
And we'll select our YouTube logo
to bring it back to the top.
Okay, so you can get pretty creative with this,
but you can see already, that we're starting to create
something that's looking pretty decent.
Okay, so let's get rid of this image here
and I will show you how to do the background removal.
So let's go Remove,
and let's just leave our image here as it currently is.
Now, to remove the background from our image,
we will need to use a different app.
The easiest one I've found that is free is called Eraser,
and there'll be a link to that
down in the description as well.
So when you open up Eraser,
you want to come up to the top left-hand corner
to add in an image.
We'll go find our image.
Now we want to crop this down, just by selecting CROP,
just to the areas that we actually want to use.
Now, there's preset crops down here that you can use
or you can press Free,
which means you can just grab these arrows here
and reposition the crop area.
Let's just put this to here,
maybe we'll crop down the top as well.
Any areas that you're not going to use in your end product,
you can crop out straight away.
So we go done.
Now this is where we get to the background removal.
So you want to come over here then to ERASE.
There's a few different tools in here to do this.
If you've got a lot of similar colors in the background,
like a green screen, white screen, blue screen,
then you can just come across to TargetColor
and tap on the area that you want to remove and let it go.
And it's gonna do a pretty good job at removing,
in our case, a lot of the walls in the background.
So that's Color, you can also use TargetArea.
Same sort of thing, press TargetArea,
and let's position it up here.
Let's tap on the screen, let's try and get rid of
this dark color here in this area.
When we let go of it, it's removed a lot of stuff.
Now we can adjust the threshold here with this slider
and you can see that we're able
to bring some of that stuff back.
So don't be afraid to try a couple of different options,
there is an undo button at the top here.
Those are the two main tools that you can use.
But the third one here that you may need to use
is just the general eraser touch
down the bottom left-hand corner.
So how that works is you tap on the screen
and you'll get two circles that appear.
The little one is where you actually touch with your finger
and the big circle is the area that gets removed.
So you can see, if I draw over this section here,
we've now removed half of my head, so let's undo that.
So the idea here is that you're tapping on that small circle
and you're pulling it down, but you're erasing everything
that is touched by or covered by that bigger circle.
Now, in this case here, we're down here,
I can't move across anymore, I can't move down anymore
without removing too much of my shoulder.
So we will need to adjust the width
to make that area smaller.
Then we just keep coming down here,
then we're just manually removing the areas
that we don't want.
Now, you actually don't need to be too accurate with this
because if you do make a mistake, let's say we drew in here,
we can then come back to Restore,
and we can restore that section back in
just by drawing it back in.
Let's go back to Eraser.
And there's also a setting in here to smooth the edges,
which means that you don't need to get them 100% accurate
because you can soften them to still make them look good.
Now, you can also pinch to zoom on here
if you want to get a higher level of accuracy,
and then keep drawing around to remove your background.
Okay, so that's looking pretty good.
We're going to hit done.
Okay, so from there, you can come across to ADJUST.
Now, this is where you can add any of that smoothness in.
You see, you don't need to add too much,
so probably on the one we're going to add on this one,
and hit the tick,
but you also adjust the colors in this shot here too.
So we can come across and adjust the exposure,
maybe make a little bit brighter and hit the tick.
Once we're done with that you hit the cross down the bottom.
We can come up to share,
and you do want to make sure that you are exporting here
to a PNG transparent file at the maximum resolution,
and then hit SAVE down the bottom, hit Yes.
Now you want to go back across to Phonto,
down to menu, Add Image and go and select your image there,
press Done.
And once again, we're going to make it bigger,
and now we have an image in there
with the background removed.
I will scale it back down a little bit.
Okay, so now that we've got the cutout in there,
I'm actually gonna remove this color block here.
Let's move me back across a little bit.
Let's go ahead and add in a couple of other images
down the bottom here related to this video.
So, for this, I want to head over to our YouTube channel,
just using the Chrome browser app for this.
I just wanna take a screenshot of some of our images here
that we can use inside of our thumbnail.
I'll take a screenshot now,
let's tap on that to bring it up.
Let's go ahead and crop this down.
I'm gonna come up here to Done and go Save to Photos.
And let's take another screenshot here.
Again, let's tap on that while it's still on the screen.
Let's crop this down for the next one here
and let's hit Done and Save to Photos.
Now, let's get back to Phonto.
Let's add in an image.
Let's select one of our thumbnail images there.
Now, these are pretty low quality
but that doesn't matter too much,
because they're only going to be small on our image here.
And let's add in the other one as well.
Let's pick the other one, adjusting it down here.
Now, select on one of these, let's go Size,
let's make it a little bit smaller.
Let's select it again, let's go tilt,
and maybe let's put a little bit of angle on it,
move it across a bit more.
Likewise with the next one here.
Size, let's take it down a little bit,
let's move it across.
I'm gonna put it on top of the other one there,
and maybe we'll angle this one back the other way a bit.
Something like that looks pretty good.
So when we're done, all we need to do
is hit the share button down the bottom right-hand corner.
Let's go to Save Project first,
so that we're saving it here inside of Phonto
in case we want to come back
and make further adjustments to it.
We're gonna come back then down to share
and let's choose Save Image,
and the file is now saved on our phone.
Now, to upload this to our YouTube video,
all we need to do is desktop open up the YouTube Studio app,
go over to Videos, let's select our video here
that doesn't have a thumbnail image on it,
"World's Best Video",
we want to hit the little edit button there.
And you can see we've got a little edit button
on our thumbnail image there.
So we press on that,
we can then select our custom thumbnail,
pick the image that we've just created,
press SELECT and then SAVE,
and that thumbnail image is now live on our YouTube video.
So now that you know
how to make your thumbnail on your iPhone,
if you are interested in diving in a little bit more
around the thumbnail strategy
and what's going to help you get the clicks
and the different elements
and those sorts of things that you can use,
then check out the video linked on-screen,
where we go a little deeper on this stuff.