- Thumbnails are one of
the most critical elements to ranking your content
and to getting views. So in this tutorial we're gonna step through exactly how to make thumbnails for YouTube videos easy, fast, and free. (upbeat music) Hey, it's Justin Brown
here from Primal Video, where we help you amplify your business and brand with 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 linked in the
description box below. So let's jump into it. YouTube thumbnails are an
incredibly important element of video optimization. Without an attractive thumbnail, you won't grab the attention
of your potential viewers, which means you'll miss out
on the click and the view. So fortunately though, there are free ways to easily create effective thumbnails. In this video, we're gonna run through a full custom
YouTube thumbnail tutorial so you can follow along step by step. Now we're gonna step
through exactly how we used to do it before we started
outsourcing our thumbnails. So while it is a simple
process to create your own, if you are interested in outsourcing, then I'm gonna share with you exactly how we do that at the end of this video. Now probably the biggest misconception is that you need to be
using apps like Photoshop to create your thumbnails. So if you've got Photoshop
and you know how to use it, then by all means, definitely go for it. But you can definitely
do it without Photoshop. Simple apps like even
Keynote and PowerPoint are fantastic for
creating thumbnail images. Mike used to create most of our thumbnails just using Keynote. But the process is nearly identical using a free online service like Canva, that will work across all platforms. So today we're gonna use Canva because it's so simple
to get great results fast and it's completely free. Okay, now if you're
creating thumbnail images with yourself in them, meaning that you're going
to be pulling a freeze frame out of the video you have created, it's a good idea to at
the end of your recording, scroll across the end here, to actually pose for a few
different thumbnail images. So what I'll do to start out with is I'll do the cheesy smile. Point at some stuff, give a
couple of different options so that when I'm coming through here to find the thumbnail image for our video, then I can just take a screenshot or export a freeze frame from here. Much easier to find than one
that's back through here, partway through a sentence or something, trying to find something
that looks half decent. So always at the end, try
to pose for something. Pull a few different faces. Point at a few different things so that you've got some options. So for our example here,
we'll just use this one here. I'm using VLC to playback your videos. You can just choose video take snapshot and that will save out
that freeze frame for you. Or you can make the video playback bigger and just take a screenshot
of your screen here and use that as your image. So if you're on Mac,
that's command shift four, or if you're on Windows you
can open up the snip tool. And we'll just save that to the desktop. Image. Okay, so now that we've
got our image sorted, let's jump over to Canva. And you wanna hit this big
button in the top corner, create a design, which will
bring you to this page here. Now if you come over here
to use custom dimensions, just type in 1920 by 1080 and press design. There's a heap of preset templates and layouts and all those
sorts of things in here, but what we're gonna do is
bring in our image first. So we'll hit uploads, select upload your own images, find the image that we just saved out, and that's good to go now
to be used in our thumbnail. So we just stretch that up, size that up so that it
fits our canvas size. You actually make it a bit
bigger than the original size and you've got a little bit of flexibility to move it around a bit. The next thing we wanna
do is add in some text, but generally to make your text pop out on a thumbnail like this, I like to add in a shape behind it. So we'll come down here
and go to elements, then shapes, and we're just gonna pick
one of these free shapes. I like going the square, but squashing it down
so it is a rectangle. Bring that up about here somewhere. And on that box we can change the color by pressing up here. And let's add a new document color. We're gonna paste in
our Primal Video color. So this is where you can keep everything on brand and to all your brand colors. And we will add some text. So click on text, and in here, again, there's a heap of different presets that you can use to just drag these out if
you like the way they look. I will delete that. And we're just gonna
come back up to the top and just go add a heading. And drag that on. We'll type in how to. And we will make this our
font, which is Oswald. One of these days I should
really learn the alphabet. We'll go bold. And we will make it bigger. And I'll resize this box down a bit. I'll make that font white. Back to the color picker,
and we'll go white. How to. Now what you can do here is
if you select these two boxes, the background and the actual font itself, which we can do just by
drawing a box around them here. Then we can actually group them together. And once they're grouped, you can do things like scale it up. You can rotate them a bit. So a lot of our branding is
slightly angled like that. So you can move it around. We'll just get all the
text in their first, then we'll position them so it looks good. So what we can do if we
wanna duplicate this, we can just select it and
come over here to copy. We now have two of them. So we can now go how to edit faster. We might do, so it's easier to edit, is to select it and choose ungroup. And then we can edit these two separate. So we'll stretch this out
so it fits, edit faster. We can then resize the box. Okay, so we've got how to edit faster. What we might do for this one, to mix it up a little bit is let's just click the background color. Let's change that to a dark gray. Maybe we'll make the font white as well. How to edit faster, I'm gonna go a bit darker gray. So you can either pick
the preset colors here or you can add a new color. And here's where you get to dial it in. Cool, how to edit faster. So what we might do here is just reposition our background image. We might scale it up a little bit more and move it over just a touch. Now we've got more room for
the text up in this corner and again we can change
the angles on them. Maybe we'll scale this one
down just a little bit. How to edit faster. Now you can also bring in other
graphics and things as well. So we come over here to uploads and upload your own images. We'll click the Adobe Premiere logo, because this is all
about how to edit faster. Once that's uploaded, we will click on it. You see it's nearly done. It's uploading here. We'll click on it. That will bring it into our project here. We can scale it up and down. Maybe we'll put it up
in the top corner here or even actually let's put it down in the bottom corner here. So it's all a creative process. It's all about matching your brand, but there's one other thing
that I would suggest that you do with your images to
make them pop a bit more here on your thumbnail. So if we click on our background image, and we come up here to filter. And we go to advanced options. Obviously you can adjust your brightness, your contrast, saturation, tint. There's a heap of
different options in here, or there's preset filters. Think of these like Instagram filters that you can apply to
your thumbnails as well. What I suggest is that
you keep it on normal, depending on how good
or bad your photo is, and I would boost the
saturation just a little bit so that your colors pop a bit more. And keep in mind that most people are gonna be viewing these pretty small on their screen or on their phone. So it doesn't actually matter if it's probably a little bit
over the top in this case, because it's going to look
good when it's much smaller. And the other thing you can do is to sharpen it up a little bit. So if you grab the blur slider and slide it up you're gonna blur, but if you go the other way, you're actually gonna
do the opposite of it and sharpen it up. So I'll probably just add a little bit of sharpen on their as well, just to make it a little bit more crispy. So those are the primary ones that I would suggest you play with, but feel free to adjust the
brightness, the contrast, and make any other corrections
or adjustments to your image to get it how you like it. Cool, so I'm looking at this
now, it looks pretty good. I might actually just
do some final tweaking, and I'd probably make the text here just a little bit bigger. Okay, that's looking pretty good. Just to give an example
of the thumbnail images, most people are actually gonna be viewing it at this sort of size. So you wanna make sure that it looks good at the smaller size, and that you've also
taken into consideration where the graphic elements
and things are over it. So you probably don't
wanna have too much text in this top right hand corner, because you can see as they mouse over, you get the little watch later button. And exactly the same in the
bottom right hand corner with the time or the length of the video. So if you've got critical text down there, then it could potentially be covered up when the user mouses over it. So you can see with this one here, we've put the mouse over it. It's only covering the Premiere logo. It's not actually covering
how to edit videos faster. Okay, and coming back
to our thumbnail now, just one more thing I do wanna
show you in the elements, because this a pretty cool
design thing that you can do, is under shapes, you can
do some simple things that are gonna make your thumbnails pop. Just click another rectangle. Let's scale this one up quite a bit. Let's move it off to the side here. And actually before we do this, let's rotate it a little
bit so it's on an angle. Let's bring this down to about here. And we can come up here
to the transparency button and we can lower that down. So you can start to see
the things behind it. And the other thing you
can do is hit arrange. You can see that our
white box is currently over the top of everything there. We can actually send it to the back. So you just keep hitting back until it's behind all of your elements. So it's another way that you can just break up your thumbnails and add a little bit more polish to them just by using some simple
elements like a rectangle, and rotating it. Once you're done, all you
need to do is hit download, choose JPEG, and hit download. And that's gonna ask you where you want to save it on your computer. And jump into YouTube and
upload it on your video. Now earlier in the video, I did mention that we are now outsourcing
our thumbnail design. So we use a service called
Design Pickle to do that. So they're a subscription design service where you pay a monthly fee
and you get unlimited designs. So it works great, not
just for thumbnails, but really any Instagram,
any social graphic, branding, PDF guides, banners, really any graphic design
work that you need. So that's what we're currently using to outsource our graphic design work. And there's obviously links
in the description below if you're interested in checking that out. So now that you've got your
thumbnail template sorted, another powerful element of branding is animated titles and introductions. And it's not as hard as you might think. Check out the videos linked onscreen for a heap more information on those, and I'll see you soon.
