(light music) 2 2
-: Let's use Photoshop and create a thumbnail image 3 3
with me pointing on it. 4 4
Photoshop on a Mac and Windows is very, very similar. 5 5
If you ever hear me mention Command + C for copy 6 6
and you're using Windows, then that's actually Control + C. 7 7
By the same token, if I use the Option button on a Mac, 8 8
use the Alt, A-L-T button on Windows. 9 9
This will make much more sense 10 10
as we go through this exercise here together. 11 11
The first thing we're gonna do 12 12
is we're gonna look at which image we want to use. 13 13
You could see here I have a number of different images, 14 14
which are just screen prints from that video. 15 15
What I do is I label them all accordingly. 16 16
So, the face screenshot of me pointing right 17 17
is labeled POINT_RIGHT. 18 18
The one of me pointing left is labeled POINT_LEFT. 19 19
What we'll do now is I'm gonna open up Photoshop. 20 20
We're gonna create a new document. 21 21
Now when you create a thumbnail image in YouTube, 22 22
you have to make sure that the parameters are correct. 23 23
The parameters are a width of 1,280 and a height of 720. 24 24
We can enter that in right here, 1,280 25 25
and then 720. 26 26
If you wanted to, you can even create a preset here, 27 27
meaning a template. 28 28
We're not gonna do that right now. 29 29
We're just gonna keep it really simple. 30 30
Let's click on create. 31 31
It doesn't matter if you have a background color. 32 32
I'll just leave it at yellow for now. 33 33
So, create. 34 34
Great. 35 35
Now you might look at my version of Photoshop here 36 36
and realize that your toolbars look a little bit different. 37 37
What I want you to do please is right here, 38 38
when I click on windows within Photoshop, 39 39
you'll see I have a number of different items selected. 40 40
Make sure you have these exact same list selected. 41 41
If I deselected layers, watch what happens 42 42
to the bottom right-hand corner of my screen. 43 43
Layers is gone. 44 44
Again, pause me and make sure you have 45 45
all of these items here selected. 46 46
Okay, great. 47 47
What I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna open up the image 48 48
that we're gonna use in this thumbnail. 49 49
I'll go to file, open. 50 50
I will grab the first one here, 51 51
or the last one, I should say, here, it's sorted by date, 52 52
which is called POINT_LEFT. 53 53
I'm gonna open it here. 54 54
Now what we wanna do is we wanna get rid 55 55
of all of the information around my face and around my body. 56 56
We're gonna get rid of the green background 57 57
and the awful floor where I did a hack-job painting. 58 58
You can see little pieces of green paint there everywhere. 59 59
Click here and go to magic wand tool. 60 60
Yeah. 61 61
You select it. 62 62
And then you can do cut, 63 63
Control + X or Command + X on a Mac. 64 64
You can see that I selected a bunch of stuff 65 65
but not everything. 66 66
I'm gonna hit Command + Z or Control + Z to undo that. 67 67
Now what I can do is I can actually add to that. 68 68
I can go here to quick selection tool 69 69
instead of magic wand tool. 70 70
By the way, if you ever aren't sure 71 71
how to get rid of all of these dancing ants 72 72
as they call these lines here, what you can do 73 73
is you can hit Command + D or Control + D. 74 74
I'll do that right now. 75 75
See how it deselected it. 76 76
This time again, we're gonna select the top one, 77 77
which is quick selection tool. 78 78
I'm gonna select around here. 79 79
But you see how my fingers are now covered up, 80 80
like darn, I want my finger to actually be in the image. 81 81
I can hit Control + Z or Command + Z. 82 82
I can do it again. 83 83
Watch here. 84 84
'Kay, I'm happy with that. 85 85
Select again. 86 86
Oh. 87 87
Now I hit Control + Z or Command + Z to go back. 88 88
You can keep doing that until you have everything selected 89 89
around the picture, and then hit the Delete. 90 90
Let's say I'm happy with that. 91 91
Looks good to me so far. 92 92
Let's add more. 93 93
Oh. 94 94
I lost my head. (laughs) 95 95
How do we get around that? 96 96
You can go up here. 97 97
You see the minus? 98 98
There's quickest ways to do it. 99 99
I'm gonna show you the easier way to do it. 100 100
We're gonna click on this minus to subtract from selection. 101 101
I'll go here. 102 102
Lo and behold, my face is now back in the picture, 103 103
so to speak. 104 104
Great. 105 105
Now what about my finger? 106 106
What if we wanna have a more precise way 107 107
to pick around my finger 108 108
so that it is selected part of this? 109 109
You can go up here actually. 110 110
You see here the size of the brush. 111 111
You can make the size of the brush bigger or smaller 112 112
if you want to. 113 113
I'm gonna zoom in now. 114 114
Woops. 115 115
I select a little part there. 116 116
I'm gonna hit Command + Z or Control + Z 117 117
or you can go up here to go undo. 118 118
Then I'm gonna zoom in. 119 119
'Kay. 120 120
You can always go to view to zoom in or out, 121 121
or you can use a mouse like this to zoom in and out. 122 122
We all have different mouses or mice I think is the plural. 123 123
All right. 124 124
Now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to select my finger here, 125 125
see if it works. 126 126
Okay, not perfect. 127 127
Get a little bit more of my finger. 128 128
Little bit more. 129 129
Little bit more. 130 130
Okay, good. 131 131
All right. 132 132
We're getting there. 133 133
Then what I wanna do is I actually want to go 134 134
and get rid of this area here. 135 135
Let's select it. 136 136
Oops. 137 137
I gotta go back up here to plus, add the selection. 138 138
Okay. 139 139
Good. 140 140
Good. 141 141
I'm not really worried about what's below there 142 142
'cause I'm gonna cut it off in a second. 143 143
I'll show you what that means. 144 144
All right. 145 145
Let's take a look. Yeah, that looks decent to me. 146 146
Now I'm gonna cut. 147 147
You can go edit, cut, or Control + X or Command + X. 148 148
Okay, good. 149 149
It's gone now. 150 150
Oops. 151 151
I noticed a mistake, two mistakes, 152 152
one is my finger, the other one is my neck. 153 153
All right. 154 154
I'm gonna go to undo. 155 155
I'm gonna go back in here 156 156
and make sure I have this selected properly. 157 157
Go back here to minus. 158 158
Okay. 159 159
All right. 160 160
And then here as well. 161 161
Let's go back now and let's cut. 162 162
All right. 163 163
Getting better. 164 164
It's not perfect. 165 165
I messed this up here, 166 166
and I've got a little bit of my neck left here. 167 167
Control + Z or Command + Z to undo again. 168 168
You're gonna have to do this multiple times. 169 169
That's why I like doing little brush strokes 170 170
or clicks here and there instead of selecting everything 171 171
and then taking your finger off 172 172
because this way, if you mess up, 173 173
you can always Control + Z, or I should say Command + Z 174 174
if you're using Windows. 175 175
Let's go here and deselect again, 176 176
and then deselect a bit more here around my finger. 177 177
We can clean that up in a second. 178 178
Then we're gonna cut again. 179 179
Good. 180 180
It's looking a lot better now. 181 181
Okay. 182 182
What do we do now about this little green part here? 183 183
We can click here on plus and get rid of it again. 184 184
The higher resolution the image you have, 185 185
the less you're gonna have to finesse it 186 186
by clicking here and there. 187 187
We took a screen print. 188 188
But if you're using Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere, 189 189
for example, to take videos, you can actually go 190 190
and you can export just the current frame, 191 191
which is usually higher resolution, 192 192
especially if you're shooting in high res, 193 193
meaning 1,080p or 4K. 194 194
Okay. 195 195
Let's zoom in here. 196 196
Let's go and deselect part of that here. 197 197
All right. 198 198
Good. 199 199
All right. 200 200
Getting better. 201 201
A little part of my knuckle there. 202 202
We're gonna add a little bit back here. 203 203
It takes a while to perfect this. 204 204
Cut. 205 205
Okay. 206 206
That looks good. 207 207
It's not perfect. 208 208
We'll grab this little part here. 209 209
It's not perfect, okay? 210 210
What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna erase that 211 211
with the eraser in a second. 212 212
Okay. 213 213
Let's take a step back now. 214 214
I'm gonna hit Command + D or Control + D, same thing, 215 215
if you're using Windows. 216 216
I'm gonna deselect everything. 217 217
Okay. 218 218
Now what I wanna do is I wanna cut what's below here. 219 219
I can select this here, this item, 220 220
and then I can actually highlight and cut what's below here. 221 221
Let's see. 222 222
I'm gonna hit Command or Control + D 223 223
and go a little bit lower. 224 224
That might be good there. 225 225
Now hit cut. 226 226
Okay, good. 227 227
Eh I think I wanna cut a little bit more than that. 228 228
Cut. 229 229
Okay, that's fine. 230 230
That's fine. 231 231
Okay, good. 232 232
Now I can zoom in and retouch these areas here 233 233
by selecting eraser here. 234 234
This is the eraser. 235 235
You can make your eraser smaller or bigger 236 236
by selecting here. 237 237
If it's too big, then of course it's gonna delete too much. 238 238
I can make it a lot smaller. 239 239
There's many ways to do what I'm about to show you. 240 240
Here, I'm just erasing this. 241 241
I like to do little brush strokes, 242 242
meaning I click and take my finger off. 243 243
So, I can always go and undo if I take too much off. 244 244
Mkay. 245 245
We're gonna zoom way out. 246 246
So, this might not even show up as we zoom out. 247 247
So, it should be fine. 248 248
I can go here and cut that out. 249 249
You can even recolor it. 250 250
That doesn't look perfect, my finger there. 251 251
Of course, you can change it around a little bit there. 252 252
Oops. 253 253
Control + Z or Command + Z to get rid of that. 254 254
The difference between a model and a supermodel, 255 255
when people are using Photoshop for its work, 256 256
is literally one millimeter. 257 257
It's crazy. 258 258
Okay. 259 259
All right. 260 260
Let's zoom out. 261 261
That looks good enough for us. 262 262
It's not perfect. 263 263
I won't make it look perfect or more better 264 264
as my kids say in a second. 265 265
All right. 266 266
Great. Now I'm gonna get the selection tool. 267 267
I'm gonna select this here. 268 268
I'm just gonna hit copy. 269 269
I'm gonna put it here. 270 270
In order to actually show the outlines, 271 271
I'm gonna just drag and drop and make this bigger 272 272
instead of worrying about the coordinates over here. 273 273
If you go up here to the menu, 274 274
you can click on show transform controls. 275 275
Okay. 276 276
It's probably defaulted on for most of you anyway 277 277
watching this video. 278 278
Then I can make this bigger if I wanted to 279 279
by just dragging and dropping of course in the corner. 280 280
Now I'm gonna put myself here 281 281
in the bottom corner here, 282 282
I should say, on the right side here. 283 283
Now be careful if you wanna show something important 284 284
right here over my forearm 285 285
because that's where the time code is gonna be in YouTube, 286 286
which will actually block out whatever information is there. 287 287
So, the important stuff should usually be on the other side. 288 288
All right. 289 289
Now what I'm gonna do 290 290
is I'm actually going to change the background. 291 291
You can change the background many different ways. 292 292
What I like to do is I like to throw in different layers. 293 293
Now if you look over here on the bottom right-hand side 294 294
for layers, if I get rid of this little eyeball here, 295 295
you'll see that the layer of me disappears. 296 296
I'll turn it back on. 297 297
If you click on this little item here, you see this, 298 298
that will turn off selections. 299 299
I'll show you what that means. 300 300
If I turn it off, I can see two layers, 301 301
the background and the layer of me. 302 302
Now I can isolate if I want to as well 303 303
by turning this on and just selecting certain items. 304 304
If I wanted to select just let's see text, 305 305
I could do that. 306 306
Or if I wanna select just other items, 307 307
I could do that as well. 308 308
I gotta turn this off for now though 309 309
because it can be a little bit confusing. 310 310
Okay. 311 311
Now I can turn off the background here or turn it on. 312 312
Now in order to color the background something different, 313 313
you have to select the layer. 314 314
You always have to tell Photoshop 315 315
what layer you're working on. 316 316
Let's tell Photoshop, 317 317
hey, we're not working on layer one anymore 318 318
or working on the background. 319 319
We can see both these layers because the eyeball is there. 320 320
If we took it off, we wouldn't see it. 321 321
Let's tell Photoshop now to color the background here green 322 322
instead of yellow. 323 323
The way we're gonna do that 324 324
is we've selected the layer here. 325 325
I'm gonna go over here to the color I want to use. 326 326
This eye drop thing will select the color 327 327
if, say, I wanted to use that red color, 328 328
which should appear here. 329 329
I don't wanna use that though. 330 330
In this hypothetical case example, 331 331
I wanna use green, something that looks cool 332 332
that it's easy to see for the eye 333 333
because we're competing 334 334
against many, many other YouTube thumbnails. 335 335
Let me select this green color, which I absolutely love. 336 336
All right. 337 337
Now we wanna do is we wanna select a paintbrush. 338 338
So, you select the brush tool here. 339 339
If your brush is really small like you see right here, 340 340
it's just gonna paint a small amount. 341 341
Undo those too. 342 342
If I make the brush a lot bigger, which I like to do, 343 343
it'll just paint the whole screen. 344 344
Watch this here. 345 345
Great. 346 346
Now we have the background done. 347 347
Now let's go back to the layer of me. 348 348
What I wanna do to make this layer pop 349 349
is I wanna have a little bit of a shadow. 350 350
Mkay. Let me make this a little bit bigger. 351 351
So, we can all see it now. 352 352
Now in order to do that, like I mentioned before, 353 353
there's many ways to do stuff in Photoshop, 354 354
I'm gonna double-click on this. 355 355
You can name your layers as well here. 356 356
I'll call this me. 357 357
I really recommend naming everything 358 358
because eventually you're gonna have many, many layers 359 359
in different documents you work on, 360 360
and you're gonna get lost. 361 361
Now for a shadow, just come over here, 362 362
a little bit off to the side 363 363
and double-click in a blank area but not on the words. 364 364
What will come up are a number of different parameters 365 365
that you can use to change your image. 366 366
Now make sure that you selected 367 367
the layer you want to change or alter. 368 368
What I wanna do is I wanna add a bit of a shadow, 369 369
or drop shadow as they call it, around me 370 370
to make the image of me pop a bit. 371 371
Watch what happens when I select this. 372 372
As you can see behind me, 373 373
it's got a bit of a 3D pop. 374 374
If you wanted to, what you can do 375 375
is make sure you select here, drop shadow. 376 376
I could actually change the angle and the distance as well. 377 377
You see that? 378 378
But I like to keep it slightly behind me 379 379
without much of an angle at all. 380 380
It's just my personal preference. 381 381
If you wanted to, you can actually put in 382 382
another outline here, which is stroke. 383 383
In this case, I have blue selected. 384 384
I'm gonna get rid of that though 385 385
and we're just gonna stick directly with the drop shadow. 386 386
I'm gonna click okay now. 387 387
All right. 388 388
That actually makes the problematic finger outline 389 389
I have before that looked like ET Phone Home finger (laughs) 390 390
look the mistake I made there or imperfection 391 391
a little bit less noticeable. 392 392
Keep in mind, people are gonna be looking at this 393 393
from far away anyway. 394 394
All right. 395 395
Next up, let's now add text. 396 396
I'm gonna add a text to this here 397 397
and then I'm gonna doctor it 398 398
by getting rid of a couple things. 399 399
I'm gonna get rid of the word YouTube there, 400 400
which is a lot of fun. 401 401
But let me add the text first. 402 402
We click here on text. 403 403
And then we'll click here. 404 404
We'll make the text size smaller. 405 405
I'm gonna make its size just for now 50. 406 406
Let's call this... 407 407
Let's call this Best Book Ever. 408 408
We'll pretend this vlog is about the best book ever 409 409
or this thumbnail. 410 410
All right. 411 411
Best book book. (laughs) 412 412
Best book ever or best business book ever. 413 413
How's that? 414 414
Okay. 415 415
Great. 416 416
I'll click here to get the pointer back. 417 417
As you can see, another layer was created for us here. 418 418
That's important because if I wanted the layer 419 419
to be behind my head, watch what happens 420 420
when I drag and drop this layer. 421 421
It goes behind me. 422 422
I'll just keep it up here for now. 423 423
Great. 424 424
All right. 425 425
Now we're gonna do is we're gonna resize this, 426 426
make it a bit bigger so that people can read it easily 427 427
when they look at the thumbnail from far away. 428 428
You wanna try to mobile enable everything 429 429
'cause people are gonna look on smaller form factors 430 430
like these things. 431 431
You wanna make sure they can read the writing. 432 432
Okay. 433 433
What I like to do is I actually like to use 434 434
font that has an outline as well. 435 435
It just pops a little bit more and makes it easier to read. 436 436
I usually like to use the color black. 437 437
And the outline, I like to use a different color 438 438
from the background. 439 439
What we'll do is we go here and we double-click 440 440
as I showed you before. 441 441
Here we go. 442 442
Good. 443 443
We're gonna create the stroke here. 444 444
Let me move this over here. So, you can see what I'm doing. 445 445
I'm gonna click on stroke. 446 446
Yellow is already there. 447 447
I guess I select it before. 448 448
But you can actually change this. 449 449
Go back to stroke here to change the color if you wanted to. 450 450
You click there and select whatever color you want. 451 451
Let's just stick with yellow for now. 452 452
I like the size to be a little bit smaller. 453 453
Watch this. 454 454
The outline gets a bit smaller there. 455 455
Okay, great. 456 456
I can also add a bit of a drop shadow 457 457
and make it have a bit of a 3D pop. 458 458
On, off. 459 459
On, off. 460 460
That looks nice. 461 461
Okay. 462 462
We'll keep it simple. 463 463
Maybe make it a little bit bigger here. 464 464
Let me make it a touch bigger. 465 465
Good. 466 466
What I like to do, and to each, their own, 467 467
is I like to actually put in my logo in the bottom corner. 468 468
Sometimes I'll make the logo a little bit faded, 469 469
which means the opacity is lower. 470 470
I'll show you what that means. 471 471
If we go over your selected layer 472 472
and then we select opacity, 473 473
see how that's a little bit, it's less noticeable. 474 474
I'll do that easily with my logo in the corner. 475 475
I'm not gonna do my logo right now. I wanna keep it simple. 476 476
Okay, great. 477 477
I'm happy with this so far. 478 478
I think what I wanna do now 479 479
is I wanna do a couple things. 480 480
I wanna make this a little bit sharper, the image of me. 481 481
I also wanna get rid of the word YouTube. 482 482
Let's just say for some reason, I wanna get rid of that. 483 483
Let's do YouTube first.