Thumbnails are one of the most critical elements
to ranking your content and to getting views.
So in this Article we're gonna step
through exactly how to make thumbnails
for YouTube videos easy, fast, and free.
where we help you amplify your business
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 Article, we're gonna run through a full custom YouTube thumbnail Trick 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 article. 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 learn 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.
Okay, so now that we've got our image sorted, let's jump over to Canva. Create a design, 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 , 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.
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