How to Create High Quality, Clickbait YouTube Thumbnails with Photoshop

what's going on guys in this video I'm going to show you how to make YouTube thumbnails using Photoshop and my own personal strategy to make amazing thumbnails in just I don't know 2 minutes or so to get started all you need to do is open up a Photoshop here go to file and make a new layer the new layer we're going to create is going to be 7 uh 1280 by 720 we're just going to call this YouTube thumbnail of course you have to know what you're going to be making the thumbnail about in my case I just did a video on uh Gordon Ramsay this one right here so I'm going to have excuse me Gordon Ramsay's face kind of cut out like Ryan Reynolds here with some big text um and you know maybe some cool effects in the background to kind of liven them up make them look a little cooler so now that we know what we're doing and we have ourselves a uh a nice little template here first thing I'm going to do is I'm just going to pick a color let's say I don't know Green pick the uh paint bucket tool and paste a color in there that's our layer zero next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to go to unsplash. com and look something up like space for example I want to make sure that the uh orientation is landscape and I'll find something that's kind of cool has a little bit of texture something like this I think this is really nice and I'll download that after I've downloaded it I will drag and drop it into my Photoshop layer let's make it about this size and then I will bring the opacity down to like 25 maybe 30% and the reason for this is just to have a little bit of texture in the background another thing I'll do is I'll go to my filter menu and I'll also add a little bit of noise that noise will just uh give it a little bit more texture and I'll also go to the uh the other like layer filter of just our blue or our green color rather and I'll also add a little bit of noise but I'm going to make sure it's like a really tiny bit of noise I don't too much noise there we go I think that should be fine um next up I want to get a photo of Gordon Ramsey so looks like I misspelled his name there let's go to images uh this one looks pretty nice copy paste save drag and then drop and now we have Gordon Ramsey we're going to make that the top layer and I'm probably going to want to position him like I don't know something like that probably so I'm going to uh use the magic select tool here quick selection tool to select just Gordon Ramsay in this layer and most of the time it's pretty easy I mean if you have a high quality photograph with uh kind of very well defined and very opaque background it's usually like an absolute Breeze sometimes it might be a little bit tougher in which cases you got to zoom in a little bit make sure that you know his ears are being captured his hair is being captured and so on and so forth um the cool thing about this too is you can actually make this a little bit smaller so let's go down to like 16 or 17 and just do the real ends of his hair there and then if you hold the ALT key you can actually deselect uh some hair as well or rather just uh you can deselect a selection too so looking around I'm pretty happy with that uh all you got to do from here on out is we're going to alt smms that's the select tab then modify then smooth I'm going to smooth the radius by about 15 there and then I hold control and I press J that's going to create a new layer so now I have my own independent kind of um almost like magically cutout layer of Gordon Ramsay I'm then going to kind of tilt him as necessary make sure that he doesn't look kind of weirdly cut off and I'd say you know that's probably good I want his head something like that like I'm looking at a few of my other thumbnails and I think that would be a good place for it um another thing we got to do after that is

we need a text layer so I'm going to open a text layer let's make the font like I don't know 45 or something like that and what are we going to say we're just going to say Gordon ramsy that's what we're going to do we're actually going to make it a little lower even and it appears that the next level or layer is being cut off so I'm assuming that just has something to do with this I'm going to Auto that make this text Tex white that looks good looks like my going theme Here is to have everything in caps so I'm going to go Gordon Ramsey maybe 37 no let's do 30 it's probably a little bit better I mean obviously still not good this would look like a fifth grade kind of design so we're not just going to stick with that um one thing we have to do is we have to pick a font so a font I really like for YouTube is Railway is offered by Google fonts for free all you need to do is go to the railway page download it you'll have a zip file you can extract that zip file uh and then just go into static and you'll actually be able to download all the fonts you can also just download the variable fonts but sometimes that doesn't work with Photoshop let's give it a try here and if it doesn't work we'll double back and uh do the other fonts great so it's installing Railway if we go back here now let's type Railway let's see if it's here okay cool yeah it actually looks like it's here which is really nice let's do Railway black little text trip trick for you guys a lot of the time in bad poor designs uh the spacing on the line is a little bit too high so here it's Auto if we were to bring this down to like 25 or something that would look a lot better um and we can make this something like20 and just clearing up some tabs here um yeah we can even make that a little bit bigger we can go like oops I wanted to play with the actual font size here we can do like 36 probably and then the space between them could be like 34 I'd say 33 yeah that's pretty nice okay great we're starting to get there but still looks kind of funky the background layer to me is kind of a little too green little too childish so I'm going to change it to something like blue I'm going to darken it a little bit decrease the saturations that it's like more just this cool kind of universe Vibe and I'm going to adjust the text so it's more kind of in the middle here uh then I'm going to transform this text and then skew it just a little bit I find that good text designs are almost always skewed so let's do H let's do up just about like 2 or 3 Dees that goes a long way toward making it look a little bit more normal the next step is Gordon's cutout looks really weird here so I'm going to go to layer blending option on Gordon's uh on Gordon's layer and then go to stroke now

stroke it really depends on what your default setting is mine is this like huge white stroke yours are probably going to look a little different uh but stroke is just a quick and easy way to kind of add a little bit of life to any design and um I guess make characters pop just a little bit more so I usually use something like 18 19 you can use whatever opacity you want I'm just going to go with 100 here at uh let's do 17 yeah maybe even less let's do like 16 yeah there you go that should be good and now you know Gordon's popping a little bit more he's looking a little better uh one more thing that a lot of people like to add to their uh their kind of cutouts is an outer glow this

outer glow is a little harsh and it's kind of very distinct you can clearly tell so we're going to make it a little uh we're going to spread it a little less and then open up the size a lot so it's just like this soft kind of bright brightening right around Gordon Ramsay's body and we are going to zoom out a little bit let's just check the design I think this is just a little bit too big so there's a little trick you can use in Photoshop if you just hold click V first select the text and then hold control press t or command if you're on a Mac you can actually kind of like drag and drop the or drag and open and close the window like this to kind of make it bigger as opposed to playing with the font sizes so that's pretty nice I'm going to make the font just a little bit smaller and then now that I'm thinking about it why don't I hm want to make this a little bit more clickbaity like don't do and then let's go this Let's do let's do this yeah don't do this and we're going to make this a color that pops a lot so a good color for that is some type of like neon yellow a lot of people see that as they're scrolling down their feet and that's just like really powerful um really gets people's attentions that's a little too green for me so I'm just going to go just a little bit down and go like electric yellow like this yeah that looks uh that looks better to me and there are obviously still a couple things that you can do for this design the biggest one is probably um we could change how thick the text is at various places so this don't here can be pushed out a little bit wider to better match the width of the don't do this so if we go like 30 for example you can even go like 40 and then we can change the size of this text to like I don't know 40 or something like that no we'll go a little bit smaller actually and then we can take this same color might even be able to apply it to this and then make this one white that looks a little bit better to me I'd say we're looking pretty good the last thing uh that you need for like one of those really cool clickbaity thumbnails is you need a little bit of Shadow effects on this text so I'm going to go to the text layer here and I'm going to add a very small drop shadow it's going to be a very slight very difficult to even tell that there is a drop shadow there but I assure you there is one if you just slowly kind of toggle this you'll notice that it is indeed toggled uh we're going to make this a little bit smaller and less soft so right here the size is super big so first of all we're going to make the opacity much darker let's give it a little bit of distance make the spread just a little bit more and then bring the size down to something manageable like this and now that we can kind of see it we can bring the opacity down for angle I'm going to go kind of diagonally here like this just to make it so that it looks like there's a light coming from this top leftand Corner okay so this is without the shadow that's with the Shadow shadow gives it just a little bit more depth uh to that text makes it a little bit easier to read really depends on the kind of design that you're going for but in this kind of uh kind of clickbaity design you know this type of thing works best last thing I'm going to do is I'm going to look for an arrow of some kind so I'm just going to look for a vector Arrow let's do a curved Arrow something like this and this is just an example here um I'm not 100% sure whether or not this is license so I'm really just using this to show you guys uh I won't be using this in the final design just drag and drop that layer over here unfortunately it looks like the background is uh is not really going to be cooperating with us here so I mean I could fix this in another method I'm just going to create a new layer from that Black Arrow like this and then twist it up like this we're going to make it a little bit smaller just you can't really see all of the imperfections and then tilt it up so that it's pointing at his face the last thing we're going to do is we're going to make the color equal to this color here unfortunately it's going to be kind of difficult to do that smoothly yeah because you have a little bit of uh I suppose I believe it's called antialising or Alys sing on the outside but we can help that by dragging clicking uh holding alt and then clicking the effects panel on the text to drag that effect over to our Arrow as well and that kind of defines the arrow a little bit more makes it a little bit better so couple last finishing touches I'm just going to make this a little bit bigger make it just a tiny bit more position it a little bit better and yeah I think that's it don't do this with a big arrow pointing towards them let how you get a design that looks kind of like this now all I'm going to do is export this so exporting as a PNG all I do is

hold control shift alt and W if you're on a Mac it's probably command shift alt and W I'm going to call this Gordon ramsy thumbnail so that's exporting the file as a PNG then I'm also going to save it as Gordon Ramsey thumbnail. png this and then upload a new thumbnail so upload thumbnail there you go that is now the thumbnail of the video and dare I say it looks a lot more professional uh well I guess professional is kind of a loose term um definitely looks a lot more clickbaity I noticed that my personally my Views started going way up ever since I started applying click bait thumbnails like that but yeah I hope that helps this is both a programming and a design channel so I wanted to get some design in and yeah I'm totally watching South Park right now I'll be doing that immediately after this cheers