 Hey, what's up guys? This is KurtzPyte. My friends call me Big C. I'm back in action today I'm gonna show you how to create a thumbnail a YouTube thumbnail for free using PhotoP or PhotoPia depending on how you want to pronounce it This is free photo editing software and this is part of our commitment at Freedom to help you become the best video editor You know using free tools everything we teach you is free So it's gonna cost you nothing to get started on YouTube. Alright, you'll see here that I've got an Elden Ring Let's play number one here background thing going on with the Elden Ring background blurred out We've got like a logo on the bottom right basically. This is a pretty good But not a you know, it's not gonna win an award But it's a good, you know YouTube thumbnail and I'm gonna show you how to recreate it for free So let's get started the first step here is I've got PhotoPia.com open But in order to create a new PhotoPia, I'm gonna go ahead and hit this plus button when I do that I'm gonna click here PhotoPia.com We're gonna go to PhotoPia.com and Presto. This is what you're gonna see the next step If you're following along you want to click on new project when you do that You're gonna see a whole bunch of templates on the right side, which you can scroll through We're not going to use any of the templates in this image or in this video part of me But just keep in mind that they are there and you can scroll through them if you want to What we want to do is we want to go ahead and create a new project So I'm gonna type in Elden Ring. Let's play Two I don't know something like that. Okay, the width is defaults to 1280 by 720 which is Acceptable for YouTube, but I prefer to use the wider size. So I go with 1920 by 1080 This is just because my screenshot is 1920 by 1080. So it's just nice and easy So I'm gonna let double I'm gonna left click on this FB event image Which means Facebook event image, but that doesn't matter what it says what matters is is 1920 by 1080 Which is 16 by 9 aspect ratio, which is what we want left click on create and Presto We've got an artboard with a nice white background. We are on our way The next step if you're following along guys is I'm gonna drag and drop our background image onto this So I've got it and I'm using a map for my for this video here So I'm a left click on finder and I'm gonna select this image if you look at this image It says 1920 by 1080. So we know it's the perfect size left click on it Drag and drop it on and Presto perfect You're gonna see these little bounding boxes so I can make it bigger or smaller if I needed to Let me show you what that looks like if I wanted like if I really wanted this guy in the middle here to be like a big Part of the the background image I can go ahead and adjust that but for this one I'm just gonna leave it as is But just keep in mind that you can go ahead and make that changes Once you've got the image placed and you know and you like where it is Right click on enter and that will place the image Also, keep in mind that I clicked on finder, but if you're on a PC you can click in Windows Explorer and it does the exact same thing It's all good. All right, so we've got our background image. We are on our way The next step is we want to add in the text So I'm gonna go ahead over to the left side here and I'm gonna click on this tee Which is really a text tool or they call it a type tool and Presto we've selected it and we're going to go ahead and start typing so we want to type in Elden Ring let's play number one something like that So I'm just gonna click here in the middle and it's not gonna look correct at the beginning But we're gonna fix it so I'm gonna left click and then I'm gonna type in Elden Ring Let's play number one and you don't see any of it and that is an issue But here's the issue. It is in black type or it's in black font So you see here when I go to the top up here, you'll see that it's selected as black or close to black It's a charcoal and it's a very small font. So I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna just click outside of it And show you a few things first off. It's created its own layer if we go to the layer panel here You're gonna see there's three layers. There's the background layer now And there's a layer on top of it which is the image and then there's this here little fancy Text which is completely wrong font and all that other stuff. Let's go ahead and fix it So I'm gonna double click on the T and what happens is this means you're selecting everything that you've typed or you all of your Text the first step is we want to change the color and the way to do that is to click on this little rectangle here This allows you to change the color of your type or the color of your text on the left click on it And we're gonna set it to pure white because that way we can see it and then so I've moved this circle from its original color down here someplace up to white So we just move that to the top and presto the text will be white and you won't see it yet But when I click the tool when I click out, you'll see bang now it is white. Let's go ahead and make some more changes I'm gonna double click on it again. This time we're gonna go to the font size So I'm gonna go up to this little Chevron of this downward triangle and we're gonna change it from 24 pixels to a lot bigger, so let's go to Something like 150 let's go all the way guys. Why not send it, right? Isn't that what we say now? All right, cool. So we've changed the font size now. I'm gonna click out Click on my move tool again, and we're gonna see. Oh, this is looking pretty good I'm now gonna click on it and move it into the middle. All right looking good guys Still not what we had in the last one, but I'm gonna show you a few more techniques Well, I got you without hopefully boring you I'm gonna double click on it again Now I'm gonna go ahead and place my font or my cursor in the middle here, and I'm gonna hit enter So now they're on two different levels So now we've got a top line and a bottom line, and they are not centered correctly. We're gonna fix that So I'm just gonna move this I'm gonna select the move tool again And I'm just gonna move it into the center here You're gonna see a red line and when you see that red line that means it's in the exact Center, but you will notice that these paragraph or the the text is not really center aligned It's left aligned here, so we want to make it centered. So what are we gonna do? Let's learn a new technique I'm gonna double click on it again as we're doing and let's go ahead and click on this bad boy right here You see it says paragraph. It's kind of weird looking P, but it's a paragraph and When you click on there's character and paragraph when you're on paragraph instead of left aligned here Let's click on this one here. This is going to center align it, but it's also gonna shoot it to the left So that's okay So we've gone ahead and selected that and it's centered aligned. Let's close it and Bang, let's go back over here to the move tool and we're going to move it now back into the center And when you see the red line, it'll snap Now you also are gonna see here when I double click on it that we are using a font called luckiest guy That is not the font that it defaults to if you want to change your font And I recommend you do just click on this and scroll through here And you can just see here. There's all these cool different fonts. I like the luckiest guy It's got a cool look to it, but Again, you're not restricted to anything if you see a font that you really really like for example I don't know. Let's see if there's something really cool membro. What the heck is that? Okay, let's go with that see what that looks like. I'm gonna just click on the tool. Whoa. Hello. Okay. This is some sort of line art type font But just keep in mind you can change that so I'm gonna double click on it again And I'm gonna go back to luckiest guy. So what is let's go pop up up? L you see there we go But I want you to know that that is available to you for changing font So again just another technique that we've learned. Okay guys, we're still on our way But now you're gonna notice here and that the other one over here the background is blurred and this is a little bit This has got a cool neat effect where it's got a black outline and a little bit of a shadow To give it depth and this one doesn't have that yet. So let's just go ahead and add some production value The first step is on Elden ring here. I've now taken my off of the top layer We're going down to the middle layer, which is the image. We're gonna go ahead and add an effect to this We're gonna blur it so you want to go up here to filter And then you want to go to blur and then you want to select Gaussian blur Left click on that and now you're gonna see here that I've already got it pre-selected to the blur level that I like But you know, you want to really blurry if you've been drinking or if you want a lighter blur Go ahead and just dial this in as you see fit. Let's go with something like Something like that so you can tell with an Elden ring image But it also allows you to have a high contrast the blur brings out the text so you can read the text a little better So let's go with a 6.8 blur. So what did we do? We added Gaussian blur to it. Okay, good So we've blurred out the image a bit. We've got a higher contrast ratio. We've got white against a darker background We're looking pretty good here. Let's go back now. I'm gonna click off of this So the background image is finished now. Let's go to the text again Selected the text and we're gonna add an effect or two to it We want to get that black on the outside and a little bit of that cool look So what I'm gonna do is I've selected the text. I have not double-clicked I've just selected the layer and I'm gonna go down to effect left click on effect And we're gonna go ahead and add a stroke to the outside and it's gonna look weird as heck on its original So this looks kind of generic, right? So we're gonna go ahead and make some changes So the first one is it's selected in red as the original stroke color. We do not want red We want black in this case. So I'm gonna go ahead and go from red to black and then I'm gonna left click on okay And I do that you're gonna see it immediately show up Excellent. Also, it's defaulting here to three pixels. I know let's go a little let's go to eight pixels So you can really see it. Let's sell it for this video. Okay, this will show the technique a little bit better now There are a whole bunch of options here But some of the ones that I want to show you is drop shadow if you like the drop shadow effect It looks pretty cool. If you like the outer glow effect It's very very subtle and you can adjust it, but let's go ahead and look at let's go ahead and look at bevel and Emboss is that the one we like? Yeah, that's the one I like there we go We beveled it and I'm an emboss. Okay, we've left clicked on bevel and emboss and This has added some depth to the text and it's given it a little bit if we zoom in a little bit You'll see here that it's given a little bit of a shadow and a shading to the inside of the font So it looks pretty good here So we've gone ahead to bevel and emboss and when you left click on that you're gonna see here that there's a few Different options, but let's go with the outer bevel now. I don't like the other bevel We're going with inner bevel looks good. So just leave it as is we're gonna go with a depth of 100% size Let's go ahead and increase it a little bit. Let's go to size 15 pixels Yeah, I'm gonna zoom in a little bit. Okay, and if you don't know where the zoom key is I'm using my touch pad or my keep my keypad but if you don't have that you can always use this tool right here that's a zoom tool and Presto we've gone ahead and that's maybe a little bit too much. Let's drop it down to about 12. Let's drop it to 10 9 pixels. Yeah, that looks good and Presto I'm gonna left click on okay And now you're gonna see we've got a pretty cool look of text and it's pretty visible It's against the pretty cool blurred background Maybe we want to increase the size a little bit I'm gonna double-click on it and you're gonna see the size button is stopped at 150 But you can dial it up. You could just either just scroll down and increase it to let's say 180 We need it 180 I like 180 Just type it in actually. This is the easiest way to do a 180 pixel Presto Done now. Here we go. We've got Elden Ring. It's in the center. It's against the right background We've blurred it. We've got a nice cool imbeddable effect. We've got a neat little cool Font that you know, you don't really use too often. Why don't we always go luckiest guy? That's the one if you want to drag and drop your channel logo back into the finder I'm gonna go ahead and go to the teaching one here, and this is the MGM logo that I'll use as an example I'm gonna drag and drop that on top. I'm gonna go ahead and select the move tool move it to the bottom here and Presto and maybe let's increase the size when I hover over the corners. You're gonna see that it goes double arrow Let's go ahead and just increase it I'm gonna hold down the shift key so that it increases in size proportionally and Presto this is a very cool thumbnail that we use during photopea It didn't cost us a thing and it looks like something I put on my channel Thanks for watching this guys ton more stuff coming up. Stay tuned be back soon