-: My favorite application to use on a Mac is Pixelmator Pro. 2 2
It's kinda like a low-rent version of Photoshop 3 3
that's a lot easier to use but a lot more limited, too, 4 4
and you can create images really quickly. 5 5
And so, as with all YouTube images, 6 6
the resolution has to be, 7 7
or the diameters have to be 1280x720. 8 8
And all that means mathematically speaking 9 9
is 1280 divided by 720 10 10
is 1.77777. 11 11
And that just means 16:9 format, 12 12
meaning the wide screen when you go to see a movie, okay? 13 13
So what that means is if I go 16 divided by nine, 14 14
it's the exact same ratio. 15 15
Okay, now, let's start one of our, 16 16
let's make an image here from scratch in Pixelmator Pro, 17 17
and this is a lot of fun for me. 18 18
So we're gonna make a brand new one, new file here. 19 19
Select New, and it's gonna ask us, 20 20
and just ignore these, that's from before, 21 21
but it's gonna ask me what the width and height should be. 22 22
And like I mentioned, we're gonna select 1280 by 720. 23 23
And then in terms of resolution, 24 24
I usually don't like to default at 72 25 25
only because you'll see that the image that we import, 26 26
meaning the picture of me pointing, 27 27
will be really pixelated. 28 28
So I'm gonna crank this up to about 200, 29 29
and you can play around with this, as well. 30 30
And this will impact the size of your image when you export, 31 31
but for our purposes, we're still gonna be well 32 32
under two megabytes for this file when we export it, 33 33
so that we can upload it directly to YouTube. 34 34
And you have to keep the image file size 35 35
under two megabytes. 36 36
Okay, let's get going here. 37 37
All right. 38 38
Now, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna insert the image, 39 39
so I'll click here, and I'll choose the image 40 40
that we created earlier. 41 41
And what I'll do is I'll select 42 42
the one where I was pointing left. 43 43
Right, left, I always get confused on camera. 44 44
Okay, let's insert here. 45 45
Now what we do is make sure you have 46 46
this arrow selected here. 47 47
And I'm gonna zoom out. 48 48
Now, I have one of these cool mouses, mice, whatever it is, 49 49
and I can zoom out this way. 50 50
But if you don't have a mouse like this, 51 51
you can always go up here to View 52 52
and then Zoom In and Out right here, okay. 53 53
Now, I wanna make sure that I've selected 54 54
the right layer here. 55 55
And there's two layers we have right now, 56 56
the first one is the background layer, 57 57
and then we have this image of me. 58 58
And I can turn off the image of me, 59 59
and I can turn off the background, as well, if I wanted to. 60 60
Let's turn both on and select the image of me. 61 61
Then again, make sure you have the arrow selected here. 62 62
And then what you do is we're then gonna make this smaller, 63 63
so we'll make this smaller here. 64 64
And I'll increase the entire size of this in a second. 65 65
Okay, good. 66 66
Okay, now what I'm gonna do 67 67
is I'm gonna remove the background. 68 68
And the way to remove the background 69 69
is you make sure you have the image selected here, 70 70
and then on this side here, 71 71
all you do is you select this here, 72 72
and it looks like a highlighter. 73 73
You hold down the mouse button, 74 74
and then you select Quick Selection. 75 75
And you can make your brush size bigger or smaller 76 76
if you want to. 77 77
Then what you're gonna do is you're just gonna draw 78 78
around the image, and this application 79 79
is so easy to use, it's amazing. 80 80
Okay, and take my hand off 81 81
and cut. 82 82
Okay, and the reason I didn't go all the way around 83 83
and then hit cut is because if I make a mistake, 84 84
I can only Control + Z, or I should say Command + Z 85 85
and undo the most recent click that I had. 86 86
Or we can go up here and go Undo Quick Selection. 87 87
Okay, so let's keep adding to this. 88 88
More, Command + X to cut. 89 89
And then more here, Command + X to cut. 90 90
And then what I'll do is right inside here, 91 91
I'll get rid of that. 92 92
Okay, and there's a bunch of dancing ants around here, 93 93
meaning those lines that are moving. 94 94
To deselect them, you hit, Command + D, and they're gone. 95 95
Then I like to click one more time and then cut again, 96 96
and the reason is sometimes you have these fine hairlines 97 97
in between what you cut before and you wanna eliminate them. 98 98
So I hit Command + X to cut. 99 99
Okay, great, we're looking good. 100 100
Then I'm gonna hit Command + D to deselect, 101 101
and I wanna cut the bottom off there, 102 102
so I'm gonna go over here and select this square. 103 103
And then I'm gonna highlight here, 104 104
say up to this point, and then select cut. 105 105
And I can cut a little bit more 106 106
or I can just drag the image directly off of the palette, 107 107
meaning the thumbnail, doesn't really matter. 108 108
So I'm gonna hit Command + D to deselect, 109 109
then I'm gonna click on the arrow. 110 110
And now I'm gonna make this bigger. 111 111
Okay, and I'll just have that bleed off the bottom there. 112 112
Okay, one second. 113 113
Okay, we're getting there. 114 114
All right, that looks good, that looks good. 115 115
And you never wanna have any important information 116 116
in your YouTube thumbnails in this corner here 117 117
because sometimes YouTube throws the time over top of that. 118 118
You wanna have your important information 119 119
on the left side if applicable. 120 120
Okay, so now what I'm going to do 121 121
is I'm gonna make the background layer green. 122 122
And the reason is because I want this to pop, 123 123
and it's really competitive 124 124
to have people clicking on your image, 125 125
and so having a nice bright background color can help us. 126 126
So I'll select here Background Layer, 127 127
and there's always many ways to do things 128 128
in software products, I select what's easiest for me. 129 129
So what I'm gonna do now is I'm actually going to get 130 130
a bucket of paint and throw it on the background, 131 131
and so I'm gonna go over here 132 132
and grab that bucket of paints. 133 133
Okay, and I already selected green before, 134 134
but if I hadn't, I would just click here, 135 135
and then I like to click the one in the middle here, 136 136
and I select green here. 137 137
Okay, that's the color, good. 138 138
Close, and I'm gonna fill this up, 139 139
and I have to fill in one more little area here 140 140
under my arm, and we're done. 141 141
Okay, that looks good, okay, great. 142 142
And now what we're gonna do next 143 143
is I wanna add a shadow behind me 144 144
because there are slight imperfections on the side. 145 145
That's not perfect, right, doesn't look perfect. 146 146
So here's what I'll do. 147 147
What I'll do is I'll select me, 148 148
make sure I've got that layer selected, 149 149
and then I'll go here to Shadow. 150 150
I'll click on Paint, then I'll select Style Add. 151 151
I'll then add a shadow, and then what I can do 152 152
is make the shadow far away or close to me. 153 153
And I usually like to blur it, 154 154
so I like it to be kinda close to me 155 155
and then kinda blurred as well, 156 156
so it kinda gives a 3D pop look to it. 157 157
Okay, and if you're gonna have shadows 158 158
on only one side of you and they're easy to see, 159 159
then make sure that the other objects 160 160
like the text or images, et cetera, 161 161
on this thumbnail follow the same pattern, 162 162
meaning the shadow on the same side. 163 163
Okay, and let me see if I can change 164 164
the opacity a bit, there we go. 165 165
Yeah, I like that a bit better 166 166
because what happens is it kinda 167 167
gets rid of some the imperfections. 168 168
Now, if you were making this a very, very large image, 169 169
meaning to be on a billboard by the highway, 170 170
then obviously you'd have to make the resolution perfect. 171 171
But because it's gonna be for YouTube, 172 172
and people usually look at YouTube images 173 173
on smaller form factors or computers, 174 174
you don't have to worry as much about the resolution. 175 175
Okay, so what we can do next is if you wanted to, 176 176
you can even throw an outline around this. 177 177
And the way to do that is you go here to Stroke 178 178
or you go up here to Add, Stroke. 179 179
And then what you can do is you can create the color 180 180
of the stroke here, and lotta people like to do this 181 181
in YouTube to to make the image pop. 182 182
'Kay, so for example, and I'm gonna remove this, 183 183
but if you want, you can make it red. 184 184
Okay, let's see here, color, whoops, 185 185
I should be selecting up here actually, 186 186
excuse me, okay there, red. 187 187
And that pops nicely, 188 188
it's not the look I'm looking for, though, 189 189
so I'm gonna hit Command + Z 190 190
and undo those past couple little changes there. 191 191
Okay, that's good enough. 192 192
All right, next step is before I add the letters, 193 193
I wanna get rid of YouTube, 194 194
just the image there on my chest. 195 195
And so I'm gonna zoom in here, 196 196
and I'm gonna go here to Clone. 197 197
And the clone image looks a little bit different 198 198
in different applications. 199 199
In Photoshop it looks like a stamp. 200 200
For some reason they have it 201 201
as a circle here within Pixelmator Pro. 202 202
All right, so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna clone, 203 203
meaning copy a certain part of my shirts 204 204
over top of YouTube, the image here. 205 205
You have to tell Pixelmator Pro, though, 206 206
where to get the image from, 207 207
meaning what do you wanna clone. 208 208
Okay, oh, I guess that's why it's circular 209 209
for them and not a stamp, okay, cool. 210 210
So what you do is you're gonna hold down the Option button 211 211
on your keyboard, hold it down and then click there. 212 212
And you could make your brush size bigger 213 213
if you wanted to as well, depends how precise you wanna be. 214 214
So I'm holding down Option, click. 215 215
Now when I take this over top 216 216
of the YouTube logo, you can see 217 217
what it's gonna look like if I hit click. 218 218
So if I were to hit click right here, there we go, 219 219
it's starting to take it out, and I can hold my finger down, 220 220
just paint if I wanted to. 221 221
I can even make the brush size bigger, 222 222
and make the brush harder on the outside, so like that. 223 223
If you do softer, it's gonna kinda blur it in the corners, 224 224
you see that dotted line there in the circle? 225 225
Okay, but let me go back actually to a harder size here 226 226
with softness, no softness, softness is zero. 227 227
Okay, and I'm drawing this, 228 228
and I may have to grab another clone, 229 229
so I'll do it from here. 230 230
Okay, it's looking good, it's not perfect. 231 231
And you want the imperfections 232 232
in the shirt to kinda show up, 233 233
and I'm not doing the best job of this right now, 234 234
but if you wanted to make it look 235 235
a little bit more precise, and it doesn't really matter 236 236
because this is gonna be an image you look at from far away, 237 237
but if you wanted to be more precise, 238 238
you would take a smaller brush 239 239
and you'd use a lot more softness. 240 240
I just wanna get this done, though, quickly for this demo. 241 241
So I'm gonna hit Option, select that, 242 242
and then I'll click here, whoops, good. 243 243
Right here as well, here, and then we can go 244 244
over here as well, and I gotta be careful here. 245 245
And the reason I like having many clicks instead of one drag 246 246
and drop all over the place is if I do that by accident, 247 247
I can always hit Command + Z to undo. 248 248
Okay, zoom in a bit to see if I can get rid of that. 249 249
Click, click, click, good, that's good enough, 250 250
and you're not even gonna see that redness 251 251
from far away, that's fine. 252 252
Okay, good, all right, 253 253
we're now done with that, the cloning. 254 254
And we could even go and clone my hair, you know, 255 255
if it's a little bit imperfect 256 256
from a coloring perspective, 257 257
which to be intellectually honest it is, 258 258
but the older I get, the better I was, I don't care. 259 259
And the difference between a model and a supermodel, 260 260
for what it's worth, whatever, is one millimeter. 261 261
And so people that do this professionally, 262 262
for what it's worth, they tend to zoom in a lot 263 263
and make little changes there. 264 264
I can change this little finger bump there, 265 265
but we'll just leave it as is for now, it's fine. 266 266
Okay, all right, we got rid of the YouTube there, 267 267
and that's important because eventually, 268 268
there could be copyright issues with images, 269 269
there's not really right now, more so with videos, 270 270
so if you insert a video of something that's copyrighted, 271 271
the YouTube community or the YouTube company, 272 272
I should say, Google, the parent company being Google, 273 273
will come after you, and just say, 274 274
hey, please take down this video, sometimes. 275 275
With images though, right now, if you were to put an image 276 276
of a celebrity, people are pretty cool with that right now. 277 277
If you put an image of a product, you might wanna change it, 278 278
but it's kind of a fine line, 279 279
we don't know yet at this point. 280 280
But the beauty of creating thumbnails for your videos 281 281
is you can always change the thumbnail 282 282
after you upload a video, 283 283
but you cannot change the entire video 284 284
after you upload the video. 285 285
Great, all right, so next step 286 286
is we're gonna insert letters, 287 287
and we'll call this thumbnail here, 288 288
pretend it's a vlog for Best Business Book Ever. 289 289
And so let's now go and insert a layer or just text. 290 290
Okay, text is here, I'm gonna go here and double click 291 291
and we'll call this, I'll put it in all caps, 292 292
Best Business Book Ever. 293 293
And then in order to move that, 294 294
it's frustrating, you can't, how do I move it again? 295 295
If you can't select it, like sometimes it's just like that, 296 296
go over here to the arrow, 297 297
then you can select and move this. 298 298
Okay, and you can make the font size bigger as well, 299 299
so I can go here, and then what I can do 300 300
is I can go and change the font. 301 301
There's always a million ways to do things, 302 302
here I can go to Font, I can change the style here, 303 303
as well as making it bold or not bold, et cetera. 304 304
In order to be able to change this 305 305
in terms of size, et cetera, you can go here, 306 306
click on Type, right, looks like text to me, 307 307
and then here you can change the size. 308 308
Okay, so let's make it 150, 309 309
that's probably gonna be too big, it is, 310 310
let's make it 100, let's make it 125. 311 311
Just right like Goldilocks and the three bears. 312 312
Okay, and let's change around the line height as well, 313 313
so we can squish those words closer together. 314 314
Okay, that's good, and God, this program's outstanding. 315 315
I love it, it's fun to use. 316 316
Okay, that's decent, that looks great. 317 317
And you can actually change the font. 318 318
I usually like to use Helvetica. 319 319
It's just a personal preference, 320 320
so let me go down here to Helvetica. 321 321
And actually I gotta make it 322 322
a little bit bigger now, let me try 150. 323 323
That's nice, I like that. 324 324
And you see how it's on top of my shirt? 325 325
What you can do is if you drag this down here, 326 326
it's now behind my shirt, which has a nice pop to it as well 327 327
when when you publish this on YouTube. 328 328
I like the 3D image part of it. 329 329
So let's actually make this black. 330 330
And then I know it matches my shirt, 331 331
but let's make this black for now. 332 332
Okay, now let's add an outside to that, meaning a stroke, 333 333
so we click here on Paint brush, make sure 334 334
you have the right layer selected here, 'kay, 335 335
so I select here the text. 336 336
Then we go here to Style, and then we add Stroke, 337 337
and I'm gonna change the stroke here from black to yellow. 338 338
Yellow, there we go, it's too big, I gotta make it smaller. 339 339
So I'll make the stroke width a lot smaller. 340 340
That looks decent there, that looks decent there. 341 341
It's not popping enough for me though, hmm. 342 342
So I'm gonna actually add a shadow. 343 343
So I'm gonna go up here, and I'm gonna select Add, 344 344
and we're gonna add a shadow. 345 345
Okay, that looks nice, huh? 346 346
All right, we can blur the shadow more 347 347
to make it pop a bit more. 348 348
The distance, you could change it around if you want to, 349 349
I usually like to keep it pretty close 350 350
to keep it consistent with the image of me. 351 351
And you can make the opacity higher or lower. 352 352
And we all have our own style. 353 353
And as you can see, it's right behind my shirt. 354 354
And if you wanted to play around with this 355 355
and make it a slightly different color from the shirt 356 356
so that this pops more so, you can do that as well. 357 357
I'll just keep it at black for now, 358 358
keep it quite simplistic. 359 359
So it looks good, and if we wanted to, 360 360
we can sharpen up my face a bit. 361 361
I usually don't do this, but if you wanted to, you can. 362 362
So what you do is you make sure that you're selecting 363 363
the image, so here's the image, it's selected. 364 364
Then what you can do is you can actually go down here, 365 365
you see this, and you can select Sharpen. 366 366
Okay, and let's zoom in a bit. 367 367
It might be hard to kinda tell if it's gonna sharpen it. 368 368
You could select Shadows, Midtones, 369 369
or Highlights, if you want to. 370 370
I usually just select All, and then watch this, 371 371
it actually sharpens it a bit. 372 372
Okay, that's obviously overkill, 373 373
but it looks kinda sharp there. 374 374
That was too much contrast, I don't like that, 375 375
but you can play around with that if you want to. 376 376
You can also go down here, 377 377
and this looks identical, but it's not. 378 378
What's changed here is that title, okay, 379 379
so it goes from Sharpen over here to Darken. 380 380
And if it's overexposed your face, 381 381
you can kinda fix that here as well. 382 382
And so let's just select All, and I'll show you there. 383 383
See, I can make it a little bit darker. 384 384
It's not perfect, I can change this if I want to 385 385
just to kinda add a little bit darker shade there 386 386
if I wanted to, if I wanted to. 387 387
I don't really do this, but if you wanted to, 388 388
you can kinda play around with that, whatever. 389 389
There we go, I look more healthy that way. 390 390
Oh, I gotta do this here, make sure my arm's not pale. 391 391
All right, whatever, you get the idea. 392 392
I'll Control + Z that a lot to get rid of that. 393 393
And then also, right here you can change 394 394
the saturation as well. 395 395
Okay, and so All is selected, 396 396
and what you can do is just go here and play around with it. 397 397
And obviously that's way too much, 398 398
so it looks like I have a sunburn, 399 399
so you pull the strength way down, 400 400
and you can change the saturation in your face as well, 401 401
look a little bit healthier. 402 402
It takes awhile to get it perfect, 403 403
usually I go way, way lower if and when I play with this. 404 404
And then you can actually change around the color 405 405
in your face, if you want to. 406 406
Just make sure it matches the rest your body as well, 407 407
and that's way overkill, but I think you get the idea 408 408
you can play around with that. 409 409
And if you go overboard, which I clearly have here, 410 410
look at me, I'm blushing now, I can go here to Reset 411 411
at the bottom, and it resets it. 412 412
And you can do that for all of these as well 413 413
if you make a lot of changes. 414 414
What you can also do is go down here, 415 415
and you can select color adjustments here, 416 416
and you can play around with the color a bit more so. 417 417
I sometimes have to ask my wife, Christine, for help 418 418
because I don't see color as well as I used to. 419 419
I don't think I do. 420 420
I know that's too yellow there, 421 421
but you can play around 422 422
with the temperature and the tint, as well. 423 423
And it all depends on the type of lights you have as well. 424 424
Boy, I just look at the lights, now I can't see. (chuckles) 425 425
And it comes down to a science called Kelvins, 426 426
which you can ask me questions about that if you want to. 427 427
And if you're curious, I'm actually recording 428 428
this at 5,700 Kelvins. 429 429
If you go to lower Kelvins, it's warmer. 430 430
If you go to higher Kelvins, 431 431
it's actually a little bit bluer and colder, 432 432
and outdoor light is a little bit lower sometimes. 433 433
Okay, so let's go here to Highlights. 434 434
Depends where you are in the world, though. 435 435
You could change the highlights here, 436 436
you can change the shadows on your face as well. 437 437
You can play around with this a lot, 438 438
it's actually really powerful. 439 439
And I recommend that if you've never played around 440 440
with Photoshop, I would start with this 441 441
and then graduate to Photoshop 442 442
'cause Photoshop gets really complicated with layers 443 443
and stuff, and this is a lot of fun to use here. 444 444
All right, so what I'm gonna do next 445 445
is I'm actually gonna export this, 446 446
and we're gonna see what the size of this image is. 447 447
It's gonna be under two megabytes. 448 448
And so recall that when you export, 449 449
you have to actually make sure it's 1280x720 or that ratio, 450 450
meaning 16 divided by 9, that's the same mathematics 451 451
like we talked about in this video earlier. 452 452
All right, so right here, if we export it, 453 453
it's gonna be 669 kilobits max. 454 454
So let me just call this 455 455
Face with Words, just keep it simple. 456 456
And let's take a look to see what that looks like. 457 457
Okay, so let's go Face with Words. 458 458
There it is there, it's 669 kilobits, 459 459
I did another export earlier, I was playing around with it, 460 460
and you can actually see, if you look closely at my face, 461 461
you can see how this one's warmer, the one we just did, 462 462
versus the one I did a couple minutes ago. 463 463
I had to rerecord 'cause I made a mistake. 464 464
Okay, great, all right, now let's go 465 465
and let's get rid of these words and let's put an image in.