 What's up everybody? I'm TheMangus. You are awesome. And today we're going to go over how to make a thumbnail that pops in Photoshop. This is one of the biggest things. Biggest pieces of advice I give to people if they want to improve their YouTube channel is to improve their thumbnails because nobody's going to look at your video if your thumbnail looks like a three-year-old did it. So this is the thumbnail that I'm using for ETE 22 and we're going to go through and completely recreate this and I'll show you all the steps that I take to make this thumbnail. And then we're going to save it down so that you have a template to use whenever you're making new thumbnails. So I'm going to go ahead and close this out. We're going to start off. We're going to go File, New. And then if we wanted to create a preset, we could do it here. What we want for thumbnails is width to be 1280, height to be 720. We want this to be in pixels. So make sure you have your width at 1280, height at 720, and that it's in pixels. And then we go ahead and create and now we have a canvas, a blank canvas to use. This is our background layer to use for our thumbnail. So the first thing we want to do, if you wanted to, you could probably just go ahead and search for, make a new window. You could just do a Google search for images like I don't know. Let's type in ethereal clash of souls. And then we'll go to images. And then we could grab some images off of here if we wanted to to make a thumbnail width. But I already have some stuff saved down, so that's what we're going to use. So you would save that image and then you would go to File. And before we do anything else, see this is untitled. We're going to go to File, Save As, and then let's name it Dante thumb. You can name it whatever you want. This is going to be your template for your thumbs going forward. So I'm going to go to File and Open and you would find the background that you were wanting to use. Now I have a whole bunch of backgrounds. Let's go to ethereal. I want to go, I want to use Dante's Homeworld. So Realm, and then I've got Zeria here. So now I have this image of Zeria. So it's in its own separate tab in here in Photoshop. But I want to bring this Zeria image over to the Dante thumb image. So I just left click on it, hold left click, drag up to the Dante thumb, drag down, you see where it has this plus sign. It's going to let me add it straight in. And I can move it around, adjust it how I want to. If I wanted to adjust the size of this image, you hold Alt and then use your mouse wheel to zoom in and out. And then if I wanted to adjust the size, you hit Control T while you have this layer selected and it will let you resize the image any way you want to. Now, if I wanted to just, if I wanted to just make this thinner without adjusting the overall size, I could hold Shift, click on one of these handlebars and then move it in and out like that. I don't want to do that, though. I'm going to hit Control Z to undo what I just did. And we're just going to use this image in the background. I like I'm going to set it right here. That's where we're going to start. And I'm going to zoom back in. Now, one of the things I like to do lately is to put a border around my thumbnails. So if I wanted to add a rectangle here, I would use the rectangle tool over here on the left. Now, if your setup doesn't look like mine, if I'm ever operating in any window that you don't have on your Photoshop, you just go to Window and then you can just click whatever ones you want. So I just have layers and properties and some other stuff. And you can arrange them however you wish. But I'm just going to leave mine as it is right now. You can adjust yours to the way that you want it. And if there's any tools that you don't have, you just click right click on this icon with the three dots. And this gives you all the tools that Photoshop has available. So but right now I just want to do a rectangle over the entire image and that's going to be our border. Now, that, of course, is not a border. That is a full on rectangle smack dab in the middle of our image and covering it up. So we're going to go to fill up here on the top. And we're going to go to no fill. So now it just looks like there's no rectangle there whatsoever. That's because we need to do a stroke. What a stroke does, it gives you an outline on your image. So if we go back to. So this is our rectangle. If we go to stroke. And I'll just want I'll just do a black stroke. And this is how thick the outline is. We're going to change that to 20. And now we see we have an outline around our rectangle. Now let's go back to fill, no fill. We have this outline that we can work with. Now I want to resize this. So with the rectangle selected in the layers, I will hit control T and now I can scooch that on out to the sides. And we can adjust that later as necessary. We'll click this check mark to confirm our changes. And as you can see, I still got a little bit showing up here. So I'm going to control T again. Scooch that up just a little bit and we should be good. So you can barely tell, though, that there is an outline here. So I'm going to use the colors within this image to create a gradient on our stroke on our outline here. So what we'll do is we'll select the layer that we want to pull colors from. We come over here. I don't have the color picker tool. So well, I already have it already selected. You want this the eyedropper tool. So I would right click on the more options. I click the eyedropper tool and now I can select a color from inside this image. So if I wanted this sort of gold here, that seems a little too bright. Let's try and pick a different one. That seems a little too dark up here. A little dark, dark, dark, lighter. I like that right there. So that's what we're going to go with. So now we have this color selected. We can go back into our rectangle, click on the rectangle tool. And now if we click on stroke, we're going to double click there. Just single click, my bad. You don't need to double click. And now we can do a gradient overlay. You got different options here. We're going to go with a gradient and see it automatically does a gradient overlay and that already looks better than what we had. But I want this overall color, the starting color. We're going to double click on the color stop. And now it lets us change that to whatever color we want. But I want what was in the image. So I'm just going to go ahead and use that eyedropper dropper tool again. Click on that. And now we have the same color that was in the image. And now we can also see that we need to scooch this over just a little bit. So I'm going to control, say scooched that over. And I don't like this being black. I want this to be more of a silver. So again, rectangle, we'll go to our rectangle tool. Otherwise, so hard for me to say rectangle right now. And then I'm going to double click on that. And now I want to bring this up to more of a silver and there we go. And boom, we have a border. Another thing I've been I like to do with the border is I like to put an outer glow on it to make the border a little more noticeable. So we'll go to our rectangle. And if you look at the bottom here, you have various tools that you can use masks and all and the like, we'll probably get into the masks at some point in time. Not during this video, though, but we're going to go to our effects. And we have different effects that we can use and apply to our rectangle. I'm going to go with an outer glow. Let me move this over. And as you can see, I already have an outer glow and I didn't move this over enough. As you can see. But I don't want that that that's kind of glaring this cyan color. But I also I don't want it to be the same as the rest of the background. So I'm going to go with more of a maroon sort of glow on that. Because that matches Dante, who we're going to put in here in a little bit. And you can adjust this. You can make it. The spread like hardly anything, so it's just like a block. We can adjust the size to where it's, you know, really, really popping out. I don't want it that much. I just want a slight glow on the outside. So we'll hit OK. And that's annoying me that this isn't all the way over. Again, so. There we go. Now we're in business. Now we're in business. So now we have our background. We have our box around everything. And we need to add Dante. Again, you would have to search for images to use. And I'll go to and if you I'm going to put a link in the description that's going to give you like a media kit that jelly jelly knees put together. Go subscribe to jelly knees to check him out just if you're having trouble finding him, just put in jelly knees, ethereal. He'll come up. Subscribe to his channel. But what we're going to do is and he put this entire media kit together that has like every image you will ever need to make an ethereal video. But you probably you may not be making an ethereal video. But anyway, we're going to get an image of Dante. Let me go up to my Dante images. Dante, Dante, Dante. I have an alphabetical order. Do I not? So we have these various images of Dante and I do have some that are already transparent. Like if I put this one in again, you would just left click on him, drag him over, drop him in. And then bam, you have an image of Dante with no background. But I don't I'm not going to use I've used that one so many times. I want to use something different. So let's close that out. And actually we don't need this Zaria open anymore. I'm going to close that out too. So go back to our Dante images and I want to use something different. But if I so I like this one where he's jumping. But if I just put this in right now, it is of course just going to cover everything up and we don't want that. So I'm going to delete that layer just by having the layer selected and just hit the delete. We come back and I just want Dante. I don't want the rest of the image. Easy way to do that. You go to your quick selection tool and you can adjust the size of your quick selection tool here. And all you do is left click and drag and it auto selects just Dante. Now it's not perfect. A lot of times it picks up like you see it just picked up some of the background and it's going to be hell on this Kate. But this gives us a general idea of what we want. If we wanted to adjust that again, I'm going to hold alt mouse wheel in. And this time I'm going to hold alt left click. Now you see this is a plus sign on this little circle. Whenever I hold alt, it turns into a minus sign. That means that we can deselect stuff around Dante. So I'm just going to go through clean this up and I'm doing some finer detail work here. So I'm going to make this smaller my quick selection tool eight pixels instead of what it was. We'll just go through find anything we missed. Make sure we're grabbing everything with that. That was background. That is not background. And you don't have to be too crazy with this. I want this little fly these little flyaways here. And like it's just a thumbnail. You're not doing like really truly professional work. You do want to make it look good, but you don't have to get crazy with it. So now that we have that selected, we're going to use our selection tool. This little plus sign looking arrow thingy. We're going to left click on Dante and then drag. And now see we can drag just Dante out of that image. We're going to go back up to the top to the tab with our thumbnail and drop Dante in. And boom, now we have Dante without the background. If we want to clean this up, it's pretty easy to do with Dante selected in the layers. So if you want to change any of these, so I can change that to Dante. So we know that that layer is Dante's if it wasn't obvious. So with Dante selected, I'm going to go to this, the magic eraser tool. Now I have my magic eraser tool selected. I can zoom in and like right here, I can clean that up. It just removes everything of that color and makes it pretty easy to clean things up like this. Now you have different tolerances right now. If I were to set it to say 100, it would grab anything anywhere close to the color that I am selecting. So if I clicked on this, boom, it gets rid of almost all of the image. You don't want that. You want to play around with your tolerance until it's something that, oh, let me hit Ctrl Z so I can undo that. You want to play around with your tolerance so you get something that you actually enjoy. Clean this up a little bit. Again, Ctrl Z will undo any mistakes you made. And if you keep making mistakes, you just hit Ctrl, you just keep hitting Ctrl Z. And boom. See now my tolerance doesn't seem to be enough. Or I'm just, oh no, I'm just looking at background. Okay, so that looks fine. That's good. Good enough for me. I'm going to adjust Dante. I want him a little more to the side here. Boom, there we go. Now I want Dante to pop out of this image a little more than what he is right now. So what I will do is go to F with Dante selected. I'll go to effects and you can either do a drop shadow or an outer glow. Drop shadow will give him a shadow around him. As you can see, it just popped up there and you can adjust this shadow. You can make the distance more or less. You can make the spread more or less. Just mess around with this till you get something you like. You can make it bigger or smaller depending on how you want to do it. And you can also change the angle. If I wanted it to come down a different way, I just changed that angle. Then as you can see, it spreads out a different way. But I usually keep it at 90 for thumbnails because I want the shadow to be directly behind them as if the light's shining directly into their face. But actually, so I'll show you the difference there with shadow and without shadow. I actually don't want a drop shadow here. I want an outer glow on this Dante. So I'll go to outer glow. And if I wanted to use the same color that I've been using, I just... Again, you can play with the spread here and then the size. But I want a different color, so I'm going to pick the one that we've been using. And that looks pretty good, but it doesn't pop out from this part of the background. So I'm going to make it a little bit lighter. And there we go. Still kind of the same shade, just a little bit lighter. And Dante pops out from the image. And you know, use your personal... It's all up to personal taste. You could make it whatever freaking color you wanted. If you wanted like purple, you could make it purple. But I don't want that. So I hit Ctrl Z. So there we go. You just need to add in words to this so that people know what they're looking at. So you go... This T right here, that is your text tool. And if we click on that, we're going to immediately create a text layer. I'm going to call this Dante. Let's make it all caps. Dante, thumb. And so that doesn't pop out at all. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to highlight everything. And up here, so with our text layer, our text selected, we can adjust things with the text. We can make the font bigger. Or we can change the color here to white. That way it pops out a little more. And I do not like that font at all. So we're going to grab a new font to use here. And the way we're going to do this, if we go down, we open up... Sorry I haven't opened it, but you open up your Adobe Creative Cloud. And then you go to the F for fonts and browse more fonts. Yeah, yeah, yeah, sign in. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you have all these fonts that you can use that just come with Adobe. And you can, you know, select the kind of font you want. They just narrow it down a little bit. Let's go with the comic font. And we can just look around, find one that we enjoy. I know there's one called upper angle that I was kind of like, yeah, uppercut angle. I kind of like this font here. I was looking at it earlier. So look at the view family. And sometimes you have like, so this is uppercut angle regular, you would have uppercut angle bold, uppercut angle thin, uppercut. You have all sorts of different families. This one just has one family, which is whatever. And to activate it, all you have to do is activate font and boom. Now it's already in. I can close this out. Close. Now, if I highlight my text and go up here, this is where your fonts are. I could find what was called uppercut angle. Boom, there it is. And I have, and just it automatically puts it in. And now we have this uppercut angle font, which is much nicer than the new times of Roman that we had before. Now I want this to be bigger. You can adjust the font size or you could just simply control T and make it bigger. So that of course doesn't look great. So what we're going to do is we're going to add a stroke with our words selected. We're going to effects. I'm going to add a stroke to put an outline around these words. Eight is fine. Black is fine. You can change the color if you want. And boom, now that pops out a little more. But I want it a little more fancier. So what I'm going to do is go to effects. I'm going to put a gradient overlay on this. And you can pick different gradients here. It's automatically the color that we've been using. But I've wanted a different color. It's pretty easy to do. And then you just, if you want to change a completely new color, I want that boom. There we go. You can also change what type of gradients you have. So if you wanted metal, I'm going to click OK. And you could change it to like a metal font. But I'm just going to go with color harmonies or pastels. Simple. Simple. That's what I want. I don't want to click on that. And then I want to change the color again. And that's the same color that we used with the color picker to find something in here. But that still does not pop out as much as I want it to. So I added the outer glow to Dante. I'm going to put a drop shadow on the thumb here. Drop shadow at the angle at 90. And this is one of the problems with Photoshop is everything pops up right in front of you. You can't see what the hell you're doing. That distance is a little much. So I'm going to adjust this drop shadow to the way I want it. And that looks pretty good. And now it has the drop shadow. I can put it wherever I want. And you can see where it looks like it pops out away from the border here. And it pops away from the rest of it. And let me show you how much of a difference that makes. That makes a huge difference, right? And that looks pretty good. So that's going to be our Dante thumb. Now that we have this all set up, what you can do is we did our file and we saved as. We go ahead and we and we save it. If we wanted to make a new. So we have our Dante thumb. If we wanted to make a clear thumb later on, we could close all this out. Open thumbnail and boom, we have our Dante thumb. Now we can just take stuff out and add things in. So I'm going to delete out Dante. I'm going to open an image of Calia that I have and drag her in. And you see how easy it is to start making a completely new thumbnail. You don't have to do everything all over again. And once you have this established, people can tell what your videos are just by looking at your thumbnail. They know your style. Let's give her an outer glow. Purple's fine, whatever. And see, and it's that easy to do. So I hope this helped out anybody that's trying to make some better thumbnails for themselves. Let me know if you have any questions in the comments below. I'll try to answer them if I can. But for now, this is the man who's signing off you guys. Have a good one.