Did you know you can create epic thumbnails totally free?
Today I'm gonna show you how to create this thumbnail using free
software DaVinci Resolve.
It's gonna be awesome.
Hello, my YouTube friends, DaVinci resolve is a free tool I've shown a
bit here for editing your live streaming footage into videos for use
on your channel, but you can use it to easily create awesome
thumbnails for your videos and streams.
There are links in the description down below, so you can download it
and follow along.
That is the best way to learn.
So you know what?
Let's get to it.
All right, so we need to open up DaVinci resolve and we're just gonna
go ahead and start an untitled project here.
Then I'm gonna go down to the bottom and click on edit, and I want to
go to our media pool.
And what I'm gonna do is just go and drag in some assets.
There's a picture of me and a background, and we'll just drag these
down onto the timeline background all the way in the back.
And the picture of me above that.
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Now we're gonna right click on the picture of me and we're going to
select open fusion page.
Now I'm gonna select this right here, and I'm just gonna create some
dots.
This will create a mask, and then we're just gonna add more dots to
actually finish up this mask.
And all you have to do is stretch it out like this.
Now, in order to zoom in, you just hit control and use your scroll on
your mouse wheel.
And you can click anywhere on these lines to create more dots.
And of course you can use the little bars on the end to curve your
dots around, to make sure they have the contour of what you're trying
to mask out.
In this case, we're just masking out the background.
And I admit that this can take a little bit of time and there might be
easier ways to do it.
Obviously, if you just want to put a photo like this in some sort of
free editing program, you can just remove the background before you
ever put it into DaVinci resolve.
But I did wanna show you that it is possible to go ahead and just
remove the background in DaVinci resolve.
And it really doesn't take that long.
And I think if you do it often enough, you're gonna get pretty quick
at it.
It's pretty easy and it will look much more natural if you do it this
way, we can go back over and see what this looks like.
You can see, I still have a little bit of a blue edge around me.
So I'm gonna go back into fusion and select that polygon piece.
And then just go ahead and adjust the soft edges and the width of our
actual edge.
Moving in just a little bit.
And we can see the blue kind of moving a little bit.
We'll go back in again and we'll just move that edge in a little more.
And there we go.
So now we have a pretty good cutout of me.
It looks not too bad.
Now there is a little piece right here.
We zoom in.
We want to mask this out as well.
So I'm just gonna go ahead and click on that polygon tool again and
just add some dots in here to circle out this little green piece right
here, and you just connect them and you go over here and you go from
merge to subtract it removes it.
And there we go.
So now that's all gone.
We're all set.
What I want to do now is I want to right click on our image and we
want to create a new compound clip and then just click create.
And this kind of locks in that whole mask.
So you don't have to worry about it moving around or doing anything
goofy.
Now, what I'm gonna do is go ahead and modify the image a little bit.
We'll scroll down over here in our effects and we can adjust the depth
or we can adjust the yaw so we can turn it a little bit to the side
and we can adjust the actual rotation angle like this.
And then I'm gonna move me all the way over to the edge over here a
little bit, and just position me where I think is gonna work the best.
Then I'm gonna go and select the background.
I'm gonna zoom that in a little bit, move the position and yeah, that
looks okay for now.
Next we're gonna add some text, so we'll go up to the top left and
select effects and we're gonna select titles and we can just drag this
text right down here.
We'll stick it on top.
You can see that it puts text right there.
We just wanna select it.
We'll go and change what our text will say.
And then we're gonna drop this down and find a font for our text.
Go ahead and change the size.
We'll click here and we'll select a color for our text click okay.
And we'll go down here and we're gonna add an outline to our text.
And we're gonna go ahead and add a drop shadow.
You just move your drop shadow to the left and up and down right here.
You can change the opacity and the blur on your drop shadow to make it
look exactly how you want.
Then we'll just go up to the top here.
And what we're gonna do is use this right here to change the position,
move it all the way over to the right edge.
Put it where we want it.
Now we can go over here to the settings tab on the top and we can
change our pitch and yaw so we can give our text a little bit of an
angled look just makes it look cooler and we can change our position
right here as well.
And there we go.
That looks pretty good.
So now I'm gonna drag another piece of text in here and we'll go ahead
up and change the actual text and we'll change the font and we'll
change our color right here.
And you can kind of go back to the other text to make sure that you
have the settings essentially the same.
We'll move our drop shadow around.
We're gonna go ahead and move this text all the way over to the right.
Then we're gonna go into settings and we're gonna adjust the yaw on
this one as well, to give it a little bit of an angle, move it around
and we can drag me over top of it.
So you can see that I can end up over top of the text.
And right now we're just gonna adjust it to make sure that everything
is kind of in the location that we want it.
And you can see how easy it is to just select any of the assets move.
'em where you want 'em, adjust the size, change their angles, rotate
'em around, even skew them.
It's really simple to do all of this once you get the methodology
down.
So now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go ahead and select the image of
me, and I'm gonna hold down the alt key and drag it all the way down
to the bottom.
So it adds another image of me.
And the reason why I'm gonna do this will become clear in a second.
I'm gonna go over here and select the color tab.
Then I'm going to select that second duplicated image of me.
And I'm just gonna drag these all the way up.
So the image becomes really yellow.
And what this is gonna do is add kind of a glowing outline around my
edges.
So it looks like we have a little bit of stroke on the edges
surrounding me, and there are lots of different ways to do this, but
this is pretty effective and easy to do.
Now, if we go back over here and we can actually make sure all of our
colors are all the way adjusted up to the yellow, so we can move these
over to the yellow as well.
And you can of course do a color match with this if you want.
But I think this works just fine.
Now that everything looks like it's been changed to yellow, and you
can see what it looks like up in the top, right hand corner, just all
yellow.
If we go over here, you can see, I have a little bit of a yellow
outline and what I can do is actually select that image.
And I can go over here and I can adjust how big the image is so we can
make it bigger.
We can make it smaller.
We can adjust the opacity.
So it kind of looks like I have a yellow drop shadow.
And of course I would probably, if I was going to release this
thumbnail, do a little bit more of a color match so that the yellow on
me matches the yellow in the background.
You can also go ahead and change the way that the actual outline
interacts with everything else, but normal seems to work the best.
I mean, we're basically just adding a stroke around a character.
It makes it really easy to do this.
And a lot of people like to use this type of effect in their
thumbnails because it just makes me stand off the page a little bit
better.
So it looks pretty good.
We can go back into color then to export this, and we're going to
right click on our image that we want to export, and we're gonna
select grab still.
Then we're gonna go up here and we're going to select the gallery here
in the top left, and we can see our stills.
All we have to do is right click on that still and select export.
And then we want to go ahead and change it from the D P X to whatever
format we want to export it in P N G or JPEG, whichever one, it's
still going to export the DPX file anyways, but you will get the JPEG
file that you want and change the name up right here.
So just make sure you put it in a directory where you can find it and
just click save.
Then we can go onto our hard drive and select that file and you can
see it right there, looks pretty epic.
We have a thumbnail ready to go.
It's that simple.
If you wanna see more content on editing video in DaVinci resolve, let
me know about it in the comments.
And if you wanna see how to create an awesome stinger transition for
your live stream, really easy in DaVinci resolve, check this video
out.
Big thanks to the sponsors that support this channel.
You can find their links down below in the description under the
heading sponsors.
I couldn't possibly do this without them or you so thanks.
And if you're always looking for tools, tips, and tricks that can help
make you a better live streamer or YouTuber, subscribe to the channel.
My name is Michael Feyrer Jr.
Thank you so much for watching.
Have a great day and I'll see you in the next one.