 Hello, it's been a while since I've made a video like this. This is how I make my YouTube channel video thumbnails for free on a MacBook Pro on Keynote. This is a great system for making thumbnails really easily if you have an Apple Mac. Here is an app or program called Keynote. Keynote is completely free and I'm gonna show you what it can do. Now Keynote is the Apple Mac PowerPoint. So this is the app where you can make slides for presentations. Now really handily, it makes slides in only two sizes. The first size is four by three, which is the shape of an old TV, if you're old like me. And the other shape is wide, 16 by nine. And that is the shape that YouTube studio wants the thumbnails to be delivered in. The first thing we need to do is to choose a presentation. I go for basic white or basic black. Let's go for white and hit create. The first thing you are presented with is one slide with this kind of template. What I'm going to do is just click on each of these elements and delete them. So the next thing I do in my workflow is to choose the thumbnail. It's to actually choose a frame I want to grab and put some text on. For that, I go down to QuickTime Player and I open the video that I want to take screen grabs from. I'm using two fingers on the mouse pad to spin through the video. And what I'm looking for is a nice shot, something that's funny, maybe something like that or that or that, that's a nice shot, isn't it? So if I wanted to grab that frame, firstly, you can check either side of it if there's a better frame. Just use your left or right keys on your keyboard. So I'm going forward. Let's go backwards, something like that. We've chosen a nice frame that we want to use as our main thumbnail. The next thing you can do on the Mac is to hold down Shift, Command-5 and it brings up the screenshot thing. I don't know what it's called. Because I'm recording this screen, that's why it says Stop with Screen Recording there. And I will go for Capture Selected Window. So it will grab that 16 by nine window. And then when you move the cursor onto the window, it brings up a little camera icon. And we'll just click that. I don't know if you could hear that. It has grabbed the shot for me. And what I do is I grab a few of them like that. That's quite funny. So Shift, Command-5, Capture Selected Window. We'll just do one more. Shift, Command-5, Capture Selected Window. So now I have a selection of pictures that I want to use for my thumbnail. Next, I go to the folder where those screenshots were saved. And what I like to do is to just check through them. So I'll use this option. And because it presents it as a smaller thumbnail, it's really much easier to see which images have instant impacts. Leave a comment below. Which one would you choose? Would you choose one or two or three? I have prepared this thumbnail before. So I'm choosing option four, which is this picture here. The next thing we can do is to drag that screenshot into the slide. It's so easy. You just drag it from Finder into the slide. There we go. So I can close Finder now. If you're not familiar with Keynote and I wasn't, it took a lot of experimenting. What we can do is zoom out because this is the exact size of the slide. And I just want to be able to see the edges. Let's go to 50% here. As you can see, it's a bit small. It doesn't quite fill the frame. So I'm going to grab the edge and make it big. I tend to make faces on my thumbnails super huge. You'll have your own preferences. I know. Leave me a comment to let me know what thumbnail ticks you have. I'm going to zoom out even further just so I can see what I've got to play with. It's going really big. What I love about this system is that Keynote shows your slides on the left hand side. So over here, you can see while you're resizing the photo, you can see the effect it's having on a thumbnail. I find that really useful. See, that is okay, but it's not quite as impactful as that. Or even that. The next thing I would do is to import all the other elements that I want to put in here. So I've got a logo for the show and I'll just drag that in exactly the same way. And I've jumped ahead because what I would do before adding anything else is to make this picture even more impactful. There are all kinds of tools. Click on the picture on the slide and then over on the right hand side, there are these tools that can help make your pictures sing. I'm going to click on image and down here, can you see it says enhance? I'm going to hit enhance and watch what happens to Elle's face when I hit enhance. There, it's a bit warmer, isn't it? There are some other tools as well. On exposure, you can increase that. So you go all the way up to 100. That's probably a bit too washed out. But what I like to do is to look at the thumbnail on the top left hand corner, just jump over there and as I bring down the exposure, you can see the effect it has on the thumbnail. So we put the exposure at 10%. That sort of helped it. And next to enhance, there's this advanced button here and you have all kinds of faders to fiddle with. I'm going to put sharpness on because this was a zoom call, so it wasn't very sharp. But look what happens if I whack up the sharpness, it's about 55, maybe even 70%. That to me looks so much better than the soft look at zero. So I'm going to make that really sharp so that it really pops in the thumbnail. That's great. And then I hit enhance. The next thing you'll want to do is to add some text or an icon even. There are some things to play with on shape. You have all kinds of shapes. So if I wanted to grab, oh, I don't know, the toilets. No, let's get that. I don't know. Just say a magnet. I could put a big magnet there. Don't know why. You can change the color over here so I can make it a red magnet or an orange one. That's been really useful. But the main reason that shapes are useful in keynotes is that we can make a rectangle and we can make that any color you like. And we could turn that into a text box. So let's put some text on. If you click on text, you can't see. It's tiny. Let's make this bigger. I'm going to click out of this text box and click back in. And it brings up these dots where you can resize the text. So let's just write, I don't know, hello. And we want to make it bolder. So I'll select all and click on bold. And let's make it really bright, garish, yellow. So you can click on text colors here. I'll go down to yellow. There are all kinds of options that you can experiment with. So let's put it on the bottom. Put that at the top. And we can make this colored box bigger and reposition it. Leave a comment if you have any questions. There's just one other amazing thing that I can show you with keynotes. All of the elements that we put onto this slide, you can move them forwards or backwards. So if I wanted to bring this logo down and have this in front of the hello, we've got the logo selected. You can see the white dots around the edge. Up here on the top right-hand side, we have style, image, and arrange. Now with arrange, you can move things backwards. So the logo is now behind that photo of L. I can move it forwards. So there it's appeared again and move it forward again. So it's in front of the color box, but behind the text. And I can hit it again to bring it all the way to the front. Or with back and front, I can jump that image right to the back. So it's now behind the photo. We can't see it or all the way to the front. The only thing we have to do now is to export this thumbnail. So you just go up to file, export to. We're gonna export it as images. And you have all kinds of choices. JPEG, VNG, or TIFF. Let's do a JPEG. And it's slide number one. So we're going to export slide number one to one. Click next. Let's call it L thumbnail. Then hit export. Let's go into that folder. And for some reason, Keynote's exports images within another folder. So there's the folder there, L thumbnail. And that JPEG is now ready to upload to your video as your thumbnail. I absolutely love this system because the video is in the same place and easy to grab. And as you can see, it's really easy to bounce files into an out of keynote. You just drag them in. If you've reached this point of the video and it's helps, why not hit the thumbs up? And if you're feeling even kinder, hit the subscribe button. That will really help keep me going. And good luck with your thumbnails. I hate them. I hate making them. Can you please help my daddy get 10,000 subscribers? Just click in his face. Thanks, bye.