How to make a youtube thumbnail photoshop

Hey this is Sasha and in this week’s video what I want to share with you is how to make this exact Youtube thumbnail. If you don’t know how to make a Youtube thumbnail I want to share with you how to make this Youtube thumbnail using Photoshop. It’s not too difficult it’s just putting together a few little elements and if you have a subscription to Photoshop on the web there. It’s just a handful of dollars per month for the creative cloud version. And it will really increase your potential to working within your business and creating a lot of design elements and just a great tool to have all around specially if you’re working online.

In either case it’s not too difficult. I’m going to share with you a step by step how to make this. We’re not going to go into the intricate details of every tool and how to use Photoshop but I’ll give you some insights of how I’m putting elements together and creating a Youtube thumbnail for my videos.

Let’s get started!

Setting up the canvas

The first thing that I need to do is set up the canvas which would be going into file >> new or hitting CTRL+ N on your keyboard. Once you’ll do that you’ll be able to set up a canvas. Here 1280×720 is the standard youtube thumbnail size that they recommend. You could do 1920×1080 if you want to be ahead of the game for HD thumbnails. But 1280×720 will work. In fact both of them will work that is the standard size, that’s the one we’re going to use right now.

Filling the canvas

As you can see here now, I have my canvas that’s up and it’s white. As I zoom out and start looking at this canvas, now we need to start filling this canvas in with some detail.

Here as I look into this canvas, you have to kind of have an idea of what you want. A background and things like. You can see right here we have one layer, that’s a background layer. If I’ll go ahead and create a new layer. There’s our secondary layer. What I could do in fact is now put in the thumbnail image.

Maybe that’s the first thing I want to do. I’m going to hit on over to my picture area, I’m just going to drag that in here right there. What I’ll do is now hit enter, pop in my picture. If you don’t have a green screen picture or if you don’t have an image that you want to use. You could just simply make it text and just bypass this step.

The next step I want to do is right click this and I’m just going to rasterize the layer, just so I can play with it and make it a little bit more friendly. Get rid of this green screen which basically what I did was take a lot of pictures with the green screen. I have a variety of shots.

I’m going to go ahead and select this green actually I’ll change the tolerance level to about 35 which will allow me to select a little more green. I’ll hit shift, I’ll select a little more green, I’ll hit shift a little more green. Hit shift right there and now what I’ll do is I’ll just go ahead and also go ahead and hit the rectangle box, hit shift, select this and just select any of top bottom and other corners just in case there’s any left over green spots.

Now that I have it right there, if you hit the mask button right there you can see that I go way. What I need to do is go ahead and select and go to inverse or Shift+CTRL+I and now it selects the opposite of that. Then I can hit that mask button. When I do that you can see it’s just me.

I can go ahead and manipulate this. I might be able to move this over here and if I want to, I can go ahead and make image adjust and make it a little bit brighter. So my brightness is on the other screen since I use multiple monitors. I could brighten that up a little bit if I want, pop in a little contrast. If I want to adjust any tone, could do color balance. Again, add a little more yellow to the skin tone, add a little more blue. Just depends what you kind of want as far as the skin tone go. A little bit playing here for you if you want and once you’re good to go what you need to do is create kind of a background.

Creating background

One of the easiest way to do that is create a new layer, and then what you can do is you can pull a color of the shirt, off of an image. Something like that and then maybe take another color and you could take the gradient tool right there and just simply do kind of like a drag affect right there. Either doing a gradient with a circle, doing a gradient kind of with just a linear gradient. If you do a circle it’s going to have a kind of circle gradient like that. Just depends what type of affect you’re looking to do. But that’s ultimately the simplest way and simplest approach. If you want something a little bit different, if you want kind of a gray or darker gray effect, you could do something like this and I’m just going to show you. There’s kind of a gray effect right there.

Adding texts

Now what you do is add in some texts. I could god ahead and just click this, make it white and then go ahead and type in my texts.

Now often times with the texts you might do it on multiple line so that way you could modify and manipulate it. If I was to write in some texts here for my thumbnail or for the video that you’re creating, let’s just say “How to get.” and I’ll just go ahead and just reduce this to maybe zero on the web and we’ll just leave it like this. I’ll duplicate this layer a couple of times how to get like I’d say “More Facebook” and then another one was right here and then we’ll just do the likes.

What you could do is just hit, when you hit the transform key, the arrow up here at the top you can hit CTRL+T, that will bring up the transform box and you can hold Shift + Alt and drag it, that will kind of resize it.

What you could do is then create the texts and make it the sizing that you want.

Here you could see what I’m doing and we’re just basically playing with the sizings that are available.

If I wanted to get rid of this and you can see that as I play with this, maybe I just want Facebook on one line. I could drag it, of course I could just change the font size as well. I could compress certain things if that’s not going well. Reduce the font size or reduce the spacing in between each line. Now you can see them slowly just playing with it. I could move the photo as well little to the side, little to down like this. Move this over here and then this maybe over here.

If you want a little bit let’s say you want a blue effect or something like that. I could go ahead and create another layer. Create a box right here, very simple take a blue effect whatever the color you want is, you select it. I can go ahead and edit and fill with that color, my foreground color.

Now I have this blue effect go back to the rectangle area and just kind of get rid on some of those areas and tone it down, just for the texts. That’s kind of how you do a basic thumbnail for Youtube and you could even lower the opacity, make a little more see through right there. Pretty simple!

If you want to put like a Facebook logo or some textures on the back, you could also do that with some brushes. If you really want it to make things completely different which you could also do is change the background.

For example, right now I just did a gradient background but instead what you could do is use like a wall paper background. Here when I search for wood backgrounds or wood wallpapers. You can see there’s a lot of different textures and things like that. What I’m going to do is just pull one in here just to give you an example. Obviously you want to make sure that the texts or the pictures that you use are copyright free or you give credit but again this is just an example.

Here I want it hidden and put that background in there, what I could do is change the opacity just slightly to kind of reduce it a little bit to give it that wood affect. There you go, so that kind of gives you a little bit more insight to a thumbnail. Also if I go into adding maybe like an arrow or anything like that, I typically have assets or collections of things that I have. What I might also want to do is again put in something like an arrow, a circle, whatever it is so you could go ahead and put in different elements and things like that in there as well. And then I’ll go ahead and right click change the blending styles, so I could do a color make it more yellow just to give it more attention for what I’m doing.

This just all depends on your thumbnail but you can see how that thumbnail really transforms very quickly and how to get Facebook likes. Now you can have that little video whether that how to get more Facebook likes, you can change that right there pretty easily how to get more Facebook likes and now we shall do this, move this over. Change this texts, reduce this a little bit, add that space, if I reduce the font size on that one, right there – More Facebook Likes.

If you need to make that adjustment could change the blue background, just go a little bit wider right there by selecting the rectangle tool, deleting that. Making little adjustments and you have a great thumbnail for you.

Alright, thanks for joining me, I hope you enjoyed this video. If you want to see more training videos for your business and continue watching with me and just click the thumbnail right over here and you’ll continue learning with me.

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Thanks again for joining me, in the end remember do what you love, contribute to other people but most importantly live life abundantly. I’ll see you next time.

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