- Hey guys, my name is Matt Johnson,
and today I'm gonna quickly be showing you how
to use Photoshop to create a thumbnail photo
for your IGTV videos.
So they look great both as a larger rectangle on
IGTV and as a square on your
regular Instagram feed.
Incidentally, if you want to save time
and not actually have to watch this tutorial at all,
I have created a free pre-made Photoshop PSD file
that you can just drop your image onto,
that'll make your thumbnails look perfect.
You can download it down at the link
in the video description.
Don't wanna download the pre-made file though?
That's totally fine, let's continue with the tutorial.
Welcome to Photoshop.
The first thing that you're gonna wanna do
is go over here and select create new,
which is gonna open up the new document window here.
Then, over here on the right for Preset Details,
we're gonna call this IGTV Thumbnail,
and then for Width, we're gonna set that to 1080,
and the Height we're gonna set to 1920.
And you're gonna say, wait a second, Matt,
that looks familiar.
That's like 1920 by 1080 but flipped vertically!
Yes, it's almost like IGTV used the 16 by 9
aspect ratio.
But its vertical 9 by 16.
Make sure that pixels are selected and
all the rest of these settings look good,
let's press create.
This image is now the perfect rectangular size
for a thumbnail on the IGTV tab of your profile.
Let's drag in a still over here, this is from
a time lapse that I filmed in Colorado last week
and as you can see it's kind of in the middle so
let's resize it, we're gonna go up here and check
this little chain link icon, and then drag the
height up, until it fully fills the screen.
89.13% is the winner, and drag it over,
perfectly fills the frame, that's what I'm going
for right about there. Hit the check box and now
this image is properly sized.
At this point this image is now ready to be a
thumbnail on the IGTV tab of your
Instagram profile.
But, the issue is that if you choose to post a
preview of your IGTV video to your Instagram
profile and feed, that preview is square,
not rectangular so it's going to crop off the
top and bottom of your thumbnail.
The good news is that this is going to be a very
precise cropping and Instagram is going to
crop out exactly a 1080 by 1080 size square from
the center of this image.
Go up here to the view menu and make sure that
rulers are selected, that way you have rulers
that are visible up here.
Next, right click on the ruler anywhere, and make
sure it is set to pixels.
Then, you can go right up here and right around
this line click and start to drag down and
a line appears, and you're gonna see here
negative 200, negative 100, it's counting through
all the pixels and we're gonna wanna go down here
to 420 pixels.
Hitting that precise number can be hard to hit
whenever you're this zoomed out, so if you press
control + or command plus I believe if you're on
a Mac, that's gonna zoom in the image here
very very close.
You see why I made a preset for you so you don't
need to do this.
And let's click up here at the top of the ruler
and drag down another ruler line, and we're
looking for 1500, there are your 2 guidelines.
Anything between these 2 guidelines is going to
be visible as that Instagram square.
Anything outside of them, is going to be
cropped out.
So, make sure that you put anything important
inside the square.
Do you have text? Put it inside the square.
You have faces? Put them inside the square.
In my case, what I think I would like to do is
actually zoom in this image just a little bit to
make sure that I don't have this tint at the very
bottom, of the square.
So I'm gonna press control t, to bring up the
resize menu, make sure the chain link is selected
and let's zoom in a little bit more, and
then I'm gonna drag this up, so now we have a
little bit of the pond, then we have the tent,
then we have the stars up above it.
And I'm gonna press the check box.
This image is now ready to export and
if you want, you can actually delete this later
by making sure to select it and pressing the
delete key, and saving this Photoshop PSD
document as it is.
That way you can duplicate it and use it as a
template for whenever you want to upload another
IGTV thumbnail.
To export this photo I'm gonna go up here to file
export, export as.
For format I'm going to select JPEG, and
for quality I'm going to set it to 70% because
I find that easily looks pretty good.
Click export all and that's gonna bring up a
file dialogue box, you can select where you wanna
save your file, and I'm gonna save it here as
IGTV thumbnail.
That's it, you can now save your image and
upload it to IGTV as a video thumbnail.
And you can rest assured that your photo is
going to look great, not only on IGTV, but also
as a square in your feed.
With that, thank you so much for watching.
I hope this video was helpful to you.
I have a ton of other videos that I've made,
all about Instagram, Instagram TV,
export settings, presets, best quality, et cetera
If you wanna watch any of that I will link to a
playlist of all those videos down in the video
description.
It would also be a huge help to me if you
would consider liking this video,
giving it a thumbs up, and subscribing,
and hitting the bell if you would like to see
more videos like this in the future.
Thanks so much for watching and have a great day