 Hell yo, what's up guys, it's Chris Pike. My friends call me Bigsy. Back in action today, I'm back in Heartbeat, using Heartbeat, and I've got some moments I want to show you using this awesome tool. In particular, I want to show you newer arts video on how to create amazing thumbnails. There's two reasons why I really like this video. First off, he shows you the theory. Second off, he executes on it, but more importantly, he uses a free tool called Photopeia, so not only are you going to learn what great thumbnails look like and why they're great, he's going to show you how to do it. And before I skip right into some of the moments, you'll see here that if I go to my Skillshare account, he has nine courses on there. This guy is an absolute master. Here, he's got a YouTube channel follow along. If you like this kind of thing, he made a video nine days ago, 85,000 views. He's got millions of views all over the place. So with that preamble out of the way, let's figure out what makes a good thumbnail and how to do it with newer art. Okay, so I'm on h.ki, which is where you can download and follow me. If you're working with heartbeat, let's click on the first one. Video thumbnail is your gate to success in YouTube. Leave me guys. This is my second YouTube channel and the key success for this channel is crafting great thumbnails. Of course. So there you go. This is no joke. This guy has 589,000 subscribers on the one channel, then he's got another art specific channel with 95,000 subs. He's a heavy hitter. Let's keep going a little more here. In addition to the valuable content you'll find here. So firstly, let me just tell you what makes a good thumbnail. It's not only that it looks good. There are some criteria in a good thumbnail. Firstly, we need the thumbnail to arouse curiosity to bring a curiosity gap into the mind of your audience. So the curiosity gap. So let's see what he has to say about this. And they want to fulfill it. So for example here in this thumbnail, I'm targeting people that want to create this effect. So here is before and here is after and that is exactly what you expect to learn in the video. So there you go. So there's just one example. He's got many, many more, but you can clearly see what this is about. You take an image where he's standing there and then he turns it into AI art. It is fantastic and he's going to show you how to do that. Now let's get forward a little bit here to the second thing that he finds important in thumbnails. Here we go. And direct message because when you see thumbnails, you will probably see it in this size. So a clear message is what he's trying to say or a direct message. And this thumbnail here that he's showing you, this he believes is not to be a good thumbnail. Now let's see why he thinks that way. Very tiny size in your browser or in your mobile phone. So for example, this thumbnail example is not good. It's a bad thumbnail. Why? Because it has a lot of elements and you need to put some effort to understand what is going on in this video. So in a nutshell, this is too busy. There's too many things going on here. And if we think back to the video we watched or you may have watched the other day with John Yousha, he talks about the 18% rule where if you see something on a desktop, let's say on a TV or on a laptop or a PC, whatever, if 50% or more people are going to see that thumbnail on their phone or on a mobile device and that is much, much smaller in a video in a thumbnail like this, too much going on. Let's watch what he does to make this a little bit more straightforward. Let's get forward to 215. This one more direct and straightforward message, the views in this video has drastically changed as you can see. This is exactly when I decided to change the thumbnail. So a clear thumbnail is a very crucial thing. So this is interesting because the thumbnail here up in the top left here, it's direct. Like you can clearly see it's a little bit on the left. Crab sketch, image or car, good result, car. Very simple. You don't need to be a genius to figure out what's going on in it. And the most important thing for me is you can see some empirical results here. So he's showing you not only did it work, but exactly when he changed it, that's the effect he's had. So if you've made a bunch of videos and they're not getting the results you want, maybe just changing out the thumbnail is the way to go. All right, let's skip forward a little bit here. And he's going to talk about the importance of contrasting and hot, cold colors. So there you go. And you'll see this in a lot of the best thumbnails. They have high contrast values. So they've got lots of, you know, they got reds and yellows or greens and blues, but one of them is really, really bright. Dull thumbnails just don't do that great. And also think about sizes. So if you have a small something on the left side at the bottom left, and then you have something huge in the bottom right, there's a contrast in it. And that catches the eye or that it brings the attention to that individual thing. So now let's go ahead and skip forward a little more here. This is called photopea or photopea. This is a software that's similar to Photoshop, but for free. And it's on the web. Watch this. And I'll leave its link in the description. So it's just photopea.com. And now he's going to show you what he can do with this free tool. Okay, so let's start by creating a new project from here. And let's name it thumbnail. And the dimensions will be 1920 by 1080. Okay, so you can see how this is working. He's just creating this using photopea.com. We're going to go forward. He's going to talk about choosing the right image. Let's skip forward to four minutes here. I want to tell you a tip here. Choosing the right images for your thumbnails is very crucial. Yeah, he's not wrong here, guys. Getting the right image is correct. Because, you know, when you have some reaction in this image, as you can see right now, my image is well lit, and it has dynamic lighting, the light coming from the right, and there are shadows, and it's basically a catchy image. Right. So I mean, this is kind of 101 type stuff, standard stuff, but this image is well lit. It has the shadow on the left side of his face. Or if you're looking right at it, the right side here, I mean, he's got an expression on it. Like I know people, people make too much with these images of people with their faces wide open and they're, you know, they look like they just got out of a haunted house and stuff, but it's true. It does get clicks. So there you go. Let's skip forward here. He's going to show you how to paint a glow using photopea. Getting a new layer from here, and using the brush, let's right click, bring the soft rounded brush, make it a little bit bigger, and let's choose some color, some orangey, maybe some color like this from the background, and let's make it lighter. Press OK, and we can make the brush bigger. And let's paint some glow effects around the image like this. So this is just one of many things he does to this image. Of course, I'm going to link the whole video in the description below so you can watch the whole thing. He does a master class on using this free software. He adds glows. He adds overlays. He increases contrast. He does all of those things, adds text. Watch this. Yeah, let's go forward to the text. You're going to like this one here. Let's go right here where he starts tracking the text. Master, but maybe that's not how you spell it. So there you go. He shows you how to do that. Now he goes forward and he starts adding in overlays. Watch this. So he's going to go through the process of adding in a gradient over top, and then watch what it comes out and sort of starts to look like here. This will be the last moment. And again, I recommend you watch the whole thing if this is something that interests you, but watch how he starts adding in strokes and glows. He adds firstly a stroke with a white color. Now he's going to glow it. And create inner glow with some bluish light like this. Maybe we can decrease the size a little bit. And we can create also an outer glow, but with the same blue color like this. Cool. Look at this. Now just look at that thumbnail. This was all created using Photo P. For free cost nothing to do this. And that is a professional thumbnail. So there you go guys. This is the theory behind it and the execution. This is newer art. I love this video. It teaches you a little bit of everything for free. Alright, so that's it for this one guys. Thanks for watching. I've got a ton more stuff coming up. Stay tuned.