- So we've released thumbnail tutorials before,
but in this updated video,
I'll show you the latest process,
including the cool new free design tools
that we recommend
so that you can learn how to make a YouTube thumbnail
that looks professional
and helps you drive more traffic to your videos
quick and easy.
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 I mention
in this video,
you can find linked in the description box below.
So let's jump into it.
Now YouTube thumbnails
are one of the most overlooked elements
of YouTube optimization.
You could have the world's best video,
but if no one clicks it
in search results or in the suggested feed on YouTube,
then you'll get no views.
And all that hard work is just gonna go to waste.
Fortunately though, there are some simple and free ways
to easily create effective thumbnails.
So in this video, we're gonna run through a full custom
YouTube thumbnail tutorial,
including the latest tools and processes that we recommend
to create professional looking thumbnails fast.
Now, I wanna stress here
that you don't need to be using apps or programs
like Photoshop
if you can, and you know how to use it,
then by all means, go for it.
But for most people,
this can just be a huge time sink
and you can get awesome results,
just using simple free software alternatives.
Now, back in the early days of this channel,
Mike, my brother, and business partner
actually used to create most of our thumbnails
just using Keynote.
But these days there are some awesome online tools
that are more accessible
and do an even better job.
Now for this, we used to recommend Canva,
but we've since found Snappa,
which is a similar alternative
that does have a few less restrictions on exports,
but also some super powerful design options and templates
in there as well.
So it's now our top recommendation for creating designs
like YouTube thumbnails,
and you can get everything you need completely free.
So for this tutorial, we'll be using Snappa,
but if you are using Canva or something else,
Photoshop even, then just follow along
because the steps are gonna be mostly the same for you.
Now, for anyone that's already familiar
with some of our other videos.
you'll know that we use
and that we recommend a service called
Placeit as well
for creating logo animations,
animated text, animated video intros.
Well, they also now support
creating YouTube thumbnails as well.
So if you already have a Placeit subscription,
or if you're someone who is looking
for some animated titles
and those sorts of things to use in your videos,
then Placeit
could be another option to use for your thumbnails here too.
Okay so getting to the thumbnail tutorial,
the first thing we're gonna need.
is a photo to use with it.
So for all of our thumbnails,
we'll usually have my face on there somewhere.
I might be pointing or smiling
or holding up a product or a service
if that's what the video is about.
But the idea here
is that you wanna try and build that familiarity
with yourself if you're going to be in them.
So using yourself in your thumbnail images,
but also quickly helping your viewers decide
if your video is for them.
So if you're gonna be speaking about a specific product,
hold it up if you've got it or bring up some photos
and those sorts of things of it,
so that your viewers can quickly see that that video
is the one that they want to click.
So I'm gonna go ahead now
and pose for a couple of quick photos
and then we'll jump across to the computer.
(camera stutters)
Okay so I'm over here now on the computer,
I've got our video footage here
opened inside a VLC player,
which is a free media player
on both Windows and a Mac.
Now I'm just going through to find those pieces
where I posed for those thumbnails,
was down here somewhere.
And we wanna try
and find few different variations of those
that we can save out as images to use in our thumbnail.
So we just find a frame that we want.
We pause the video,
we come up here to video and choose snapshot.
That will take that screenshot.
and save it to your pictures folder or my pictures.
If you're Mac or PC and you wanna scrub through
find all the different variations,
all your different fancy poses that you might use,
video snapshot.
So you wanna go ahead and save those
and then pick which one out of all of those
that you're going to use in your thumbnail.
From there, you wanna head over to Snappa.
Now, if you already have an account
you can hit login.
or you can choose get started for free,
just enter your name, email address, create a password
and you're in .
That just to show you, if we go over to the pricing area,
you can use Snappa for free.
They will give you access to 5,000 templates in there,
3,000,000 HD photos to use.
And it will give you three free downloads per month.
Obviously, if you wanna go above that,
then they've got really compelling plans for those as well.
So let me go over to my dashboard,
cause I'm already logged in here.
And if you're not seeing this
create a graphic page appear straight away,
you just come up at the top and choose,
create a graphic, and then you'll see this.
So in here you can see we've got presets,
for Facebook posts,
for Instagram,
LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, and YouTube thumbnail.
Now, if we click on YouTube thumbnail
and in here are some great templates
so that you don't need to start from absolute zero
with your designs.
You actually select any of these
and customize them up for your YouTube video.
So if there's any here that you already liked the look of,
then you can select one of these
and start to customize it up.
So let's say we pick this one here.
Then everything in here is editable.
We can move the text around.
We can change the font,
change the colors, change the size,
change the background picture.
So there are some great templates that you can use.
What we are gonna do for this tutorial
is to start from scratch.
So we're gonna go to menu, create a graphic,
and take us back to this page.
Instead of using the YouTube thumbnail preset here
of 1280 by 720,
we're gonna make it a little bit higher quality than that
and make it 1080P or 1920 by 1080.
So this will still work for YouTube as a thumbnail image,
but it will actually let you create a higher quality image
than what their preset template is here.
So 1920 by 1080, let's go create.
So now we have a blank canvas to work from
here in Snappa.
Now this is the image that we will be creating,
something very similar to our thumbnail
that we've used for this exact video.
So the first thing we're gonna start with
is this background image here.
So for that, we wanna go over to YouTube.
Let's go to our YouTube channel.
We've got our videos,
so bring up a heap of our videos page like this.
Now I'm just gonna take a screenshot of it.
So on a Mac, I can hold down Command plus Shift plus four,
or on Windows you can open up the snipping tool
then you can just draw out the area
that you wanna take a screenshot of,
this measure will capture the whole area here,
10 to about there, let go of the mouse.
And that has saved a screenshot on our desktop for us.
So now we come back over here to Snappa,
or you wanna come up the top here to graphics.
We're going to go to uploads.
We'll select upload an image.
and we're going to find that screenshot
that we just saved for the background.
Once that's uploaded we can select that image
and it's gonna drop it into our canvas area here.
And now we're just gonna scale it up
to make it really, really big.
So it covers all of that white area
and I'm gonna drag it down a bit.
And at the top here,
we have a little rotate button.
So if I click and hold on that and move to the left
or to the right,
you can see that we can rotate this around.
So I'm gonna put a little bit of an angle on it,
maybe something like this.
Now let's reposition it up the top here,
making sure that it's totally covered
the background area here.
Now we're gonna click on it so it's selected
and we're gonna come up here to opacity
and we are going to lower the opacity
or to fade this out.
Cause it was pretty faint
in our other thumbnail that I showed you.
So we hardly wanna see it.
Now we wanna come back up the top here to background.
And in here
there's lots of photos and things that you can use,
inside of your thumbnails,
there's patterns that you can use as well.
You can obviously upload your own as we've just done,
or you can pick a color if you wanna have a color overlay,
but for us here, we're gonna get patterns
and just pick a pattern with some random colors
but of a gradient or a fade effect.
Even something like this one here,
we're gonna select this
and you can see now because we'd faded out our image
we've now been able to bring some color through here.
Now we can customize this up as well.
So you can see it's pretty green here
if we come up the top now to effects
then we can darken that down if we wanna make it darker,
we can come down here to hue and slide this across
and change the color.
So you can see, we can add a bit more blue in there.
We can make it a bit brighter if we want,
or lower the brightness.
So you can easily change up the look and feel
to dial in what your after,
just using some of these basic settings here.
Now see here we've got that light down the bottom corner
if we want it lighter over this side,
we can come back over here to background
and just hit the flip horizontal.
And that's now flipped it to the bottom there
or if we wanna up to top,
we can hit the other one flip vertical,
and it's now brighter up the top corner here.
Okay so next up, we're gonna bring in the image of me.
So, we come across here to graphics,
or again go to upload an image.
So we'll go through it and find the image
that we want to use, we'll select open.
So that file gets uploaded.
And then once that's done,
if we click on our image here,
then that will bring it in to our project.
Now what is actually in here,
you can pick it up and you can move it around.
You can scale it up and down.
You can rotate it,
but you actually can't crop it down from here.
So if you do wanna crop it and remove a section,
then you will need to do that upfront.
So I'm gonna click on this
and just press delete on the keyboard to get rid of it.
We're gonna come back across here to graphics
and this time instead of just clicking on it,
to add it in I can come up to the little corner here
crop and rotate.
So we're gonna crop off all of this extra stuff here
that we don't want in there.
Let's crop it off about there,
crop off some of this extra stuff.
And we will hit apply and accept these changes.
And that's then created a new version
of that cropped file for us.
So now we'll select the new one
to bring it into our project.
And with that image selected there,
a new feature inside of Snappa here
is the background removal.
So if we select this now,
that's going to go ahead and analyze our image
and is going to try and remove the background
from that for us.
So you can see that's actually done a pretty good job.
It has left the chair in there,
but I don't see that as being too much of an issue
because we had to crop that off
as we scale this bigger
and move it off to the side of the frame.
So we're gonna scale this up.
Probably turn around there somewhere,
move across to the side.
Maybe we'll make it a bit bigger there we go.
Somewhere around there.
So that's looking pretty good.
Now we're gonna add in some text.
So we come up here to text, we'll go add a heading.
I get a little text box here
to move it to where we want it,
but we will just double click on it
to be able to edit it.
So I'm gonna type in thumbnail.
We can select the text in here
and we can come over here and adjust the font.
So for us, our font that we use at Primal Video
is Oswald and bold.
Now I can make that big up just using the up arrow here,
or we can actually just type in a number
if you know how big roughly you'd like to make it,
then we can stretch this out here
so that it fits inside that box.
Now we'll make this font here white.
So again, we selected it, come back over here
and let's make it white
'cause we will have a box or a color in behind it.
So we'll have thumbnail.
Now, if you select your text here
and come up the top to duplicate,
you can create a copy of that layout.
So if you're gonna create multiple text boxes
or add multiple words this way,
it will save you having to set them all up
from scratch each time.
So thumbnail tutorial, and we might add one more in there,
duplicate it again, update it.
Now it's updated,
we'll probably make that smaller
cause it's not as important.
Most important piece of this thumbnail
is the words that say thumbnail, tutorial updated.
We'll probably also put an exclamation mark
on the end of it there,
and we can move these around to where we want them.
Okay now I'm gonna add in some color in behind them.
So that text becomes much easier to read.
So for that, I'm gonna add in a shape,
let's pick a rectangle.
It doesn't really matter.
You could go a square if you want it and resize it,
but I'm gonna bring it over here somewhere around here
and stretch this out so that it covers out text.
Maybe make it a little bit shorter here.
And then we're going to come up here
and move that shape behind our text.
And we do that using these little tools here,
move layer back or move layer forward.
So we wanna move this one back
and you might need to click this a few times,
so that it actually ends up behind our text.
And then we can further adjust the size of the box
so that it fits how we would like.
Now when you're selecting your layers,
if you do want some finer adjustment,
you can use the keyboard, arrow keys
if you'd like to move things up
and down and left and right in a more granular way
than just clicking and dragging with the mouse.
Okay so that's looking pretty good there.
I might just move the text out of the way
so we can duplicate this background box.
So we will hit duplicate on that one for the next one here.
And maybe we'll duplicate it one more time
for the bottom one.
Let's move it down towards that.
Okay so let's move that text back up into
the position that we wanted in
somewhere around there.
Let's grab this next box.
Let's send that to the back.
We'll move it to the back so it's behind our text
and let's position that where we want that one
and we'll resize that box, something like that.
And likewise with the bottom one here.
Now with this bottom one here,
instead of just being the gray as well,
we could change the color of it
and maybe we make it our Primal Video blue.
Maybe what we might do is just make our background.
a little bit darker as well.
So if we select on our background,
then we've got our opacity here.
I can probably fade that out a little bit more.
So just some minor tweaks and adjustments.
to make the text stand out.
Then we'll come back over here to effect.
And maybe we will just darken this down a little bit.
Now the other thing we like to add in our thumbnail images
is any graphics or any logos
that will help people quickly work out
what the video is about.
So we're gonna head to Google.com,
we're gonna search for YouTube logo.
Now, normally I'd just come across two images here
and find an image that matched
and something that was okay for us to use in our videos.
Something like this from Wikipedia.
that generally okay to use, but in this case,
YouTube does provide their logos.
You can get brand resources here.
And it does clearly say
that though while this page is here to get you started,
all users need to be approved by YouTube.
So technically
you're supposed to get their approval for this,
but I would say that we fall in the very low category here.
of using their logo.
So download it, the logo,
head back over to Snappa,
we're go top to graphics,
let's go to upload an image.
Let's find that logo, we're gonna select on that
and it's dropped in
and now we just put it where we'd want it.
Maybe we make it a little bit bigger.
Now because this thumbnail that we're creating
is a little meta and it's about thumbnails,
we probably add a few others in there as well.
So head back over to our YouTube channel
and I'll probably just take some more screenshots.
of some of these to showcase in there.
So I will zoom in on the page here
using Command plus or Control plus if you're on Windows
and again, I'll be using Command plus Shift plus four
or the snipping tool on Windows
to bring up our screenshot tool
to capture some of these thumbnail images.
So we've got one there, mark up three of these.
Now we head back to Snappa,
graphics, upload an image,
select those three new ones
and go open and let's select each one of them
to drop them into our project.
And you might notice the quality on these
isn't that great, but it's not gonna be a problem
'cause we're gonna make them pretty small on here.
Just as example, thumbnail images.
So make them pretty small.
Maybe I'll scale them all down at this point.
So they're all about the same size
and the third one as well.
And we can pick them up and move them around.
Now you will have one over here, somewhere,
move me across so we've got a bit more room.
Select this one here
and let's start moving it to the back.
Keep clicking it.
Here you go, just behind my head.
Now, if we select that thumbnail,
we can rotate it a little bit
to stands out a little bit on there
and maybe we'll add a little thin border
around the outside of this as well.
So how we do that,
is that we have to do it by adding another shape.
So if we add a shape,
let's come down here just to the empty shape,
click on that, drops it in our project here,
let's change the color to white
and let's move it up near this box.
We will rotate it as well.
And then we just position it so that it fits on our image.
And we might make that box a little bit thinner
and we'll wanna send that border to the back as well,
move it back further,
keep clicking until it goes behind my head.
So now we'll quickly do the same for the other two as well.
Now we'll grab that border there first
and I will duplicate that.
So we'd have to keep recreating that
to move it out of the way here first,
bring up the next one
so that we wanna have it about here,
straighten this back up and put it on top
and we can move them back.
And the same as the image itself,
keep clicking on this until it's back behind our picture.
There we go.
So we got two in there.
So the same for the third one,
let's duplicate that border first,
and grab our third one, move it across.
Maybe we'll put a bit of an angle on this one as well,
reposition the border on top of it
and send it to the back.
Okay so now that we've got those graphic elements in there,
might just resize a few things just to make it all fit.
And we'll move this across a little bit.
Same with the box behind it.
Let's bring the text in that shape
on top of this thumbnail image.
So we're going to bring those ones forward.
And likewise with that background there as well,
let's bring that forward.
and maybe we'll move these over
just a little bit as well so then more central.
Okay so that's looking pretty good,
once you've got it how you'd like it,
remember to come up the top here to hit save,
you're not gonna lose your hard work.
And then when you're ready to add it
onto your YouTube videos,
so you're just gonna come up the top here to download.
And then the one I recommend you use here
for your YouTube thumbnails is the web optimized JPEG.
So I select on that and give you a thumbnail a name,
let's call it YouTube thumb and save that.
And then you wanna head over to your YouTube channel
into the studio dashboard area, come down to videos.
And then to the video
that you wanna add the thumbnail image on.
Press the little details or edit button here.
And then down here, it says upload thumbnail,
we're gonna click on that,
select your image and press open.
And you can see our new thumbnail images updated here.
You just wanna hit save to make sure that that is applied.
So that's how easy it is to create great looking thumbnails
for your YouTube videos,
just using Snappa.
All right so now that you've got
your thumbnail templates sorted,
another powerful element of branding
is animated titles and introductions to use in your videos.
And I wanna stress that it is not as hard
as you might think.
And linked on screen is a video to help you with just that.
And I'll see you in the next one.