 How to Make a YouTube Thumbnail in Photoshop. Okay, so you want to make these engaging thumbnails and you don't quite know what to do. In this video, I'm going to show you the exact steps to creating really cool thumbnails that get engagement and get people to watch your videos. And we're going to do that right now. Hey, I'm JR Fisher. Welcome to my channel and if you're new to this channel, don't forget to subscribe. Go down there to the bottom, click that big subscribe button that's right down there. Now next to it, there's this thing called a bell. It goes like this, don't forget, ring that bell, smash that bell. When you click that bell, you become part of my family, the Fisher family, and you can turn on all notifications and when you do that, you are VIP. You're going to get emails and we're going to tell you every single time a new video comes out. Now you don't want to miss that. Now I've been selling online since 2009 and I've sold millions of dollars worth of physical and digital products. Now in this channel, all I do is I show you what I did to get those results. I made a lot of mistakes along the way but you don't have to. You can pick up all these points and tips that I give you on this channel to start, run and grow your online business and be successful that much faster. Now have you already tried to do thumbnails? Have you not done thumbnails? Here's what we found is thumbnails will get you more clicks, more clicks will get you more views, more views, get you more subscribers and it's a big circle. So you really got to do good thumbnails. If you have tried to do it or you have issues, put those comments in the section below. Let me know what you're working on on your thumbnails. Let me know what issues you've come up with and I'll be happy to help you out. Okay, so let's get going. At the end of this video, I'm also going to give you a free e-commerce course valued at $97, absolutely free. All you have to do is click the link. Okay. So the purpose of this demonstration, I'm going to be using Photoshop, but a lot of these things you can do on Canva or whatever graphic software you have, so don't worry about that. It's just the steps that I'm going to take you through that are really important that I want to show you. Now, the first thing you want to do is choose a motion. Now we found that most thumbnails do a whole lot better if there's a person's face on there. And preferably if you're doing the video, your face will work on there. So what you want to do and I forget to do this a lot too, but I'm starting to do it a whole lot better is to take a picture during the filming of your particular videos. And you're going to have a lot of different emotions for a lot of different videos and you want to kind of plan it out a little bit. You want to plan out, you know, what you're doing and what you could be doing. So maybe you're going to have some words over here. So maybe you want one where you're pointing this way, maybe you're going to have words down here. So maybe you'll want to put your hands like this, maybe you're going to have something over here. So you want to be pointing to that or holding your hand out or holding your hand this way so that you can actually put words there on the thumbnail. You want to think of all this in advance and don't just shoot one picture per thumbnail. You know, shoot five or six different ones. You can set the timer on your camera if you're doing it by yourself. If you can enlist and some assistance from somebody, of course that would be better. But if you can't, you can still do it. And remember to just try to do a lot of different expressions, surprise and happy and sad and angry and whatever you want. And that way you'll have a lot of choices when you're actually building your thumbnail. The second step is to format it to match your particular usage. Now on YouTube, you're going to have a 1920 by 1080. So number two is set it up that way. So we're going to upload that image into our software and we're going to set it to that 1920 by 1080 size so that it fits YouTube perfectly. Okay, let's go over to Photoshop now and let me show you how to do some of this so you can kind of see how we work through it. Okay, so let's go ahead and click new and we're going to start a new project right here. And let's see here, it's supposed to be set for 1920 by 1080, which it was because I previously was working on something like this. So right now we've got this blank background here. So what do we want to do? Let's think about this. We can do a colored background or we could actually use the background of the picture I took. You know, it's entirely up to you and what you want to do and both work well. It doesn't really make a whole lot of difference which one you pick. It's just a matter of preference more than anything else. So let's work with what we've got here right now and we're going to put a little bit of color in it. So let's do that. Okay, I'm going to pick this yellow right here and then we're going to go ahead and just fill in the background with that color that I selected. Grab a little photo bucket there. There we go. So we got that yellow background going on there. It's nice and bright. You know, it'll probably stand out. That's what I'm trying to get done here is make it stand out. So now we're going to go ahead and add an image. We're going to place embedded, which means I'm going to grab an image. It will stay the same size. I can adjust it, slide it around, do whatever I want with it. So let me find an image here that'll work. It's not bad. Not bad. What else do I have here? That would be good. That shirt doesn't look like it's going to show up that well. That looks like it's going to show up well because it's got that black shirt there. So I think that'll be better on this yellow background. Let me put him right here and slide myself down there. So I'm pointing at something. OK, so now I've got this big area here that I could put some text in if I want to. So let's check it out and see what I've got there. And, you know, when you do text, don't do plain, ordinary text. You have something that has got a little bit of character to it. You know, it's a little bit of style to it. So let me find something there and do a little drop down. Cool thing about Photoshop and, you know, most programs nowadays is you can see the font off to the right so you can see what it's going to look like. You don't have to change it first. So let me scroll through here and I'll find something super cool to use for my first word. All right, let's see what I find here. Looking, looking, looking. And that's kind of cool. I kind of like that. So I've got to obviously change it so it's going to show up because it's yellow right now. So let me type in here and I'll change the color of it. I'm going to change it to what would work here. Put that red. Yeah, I kind of like that. So let me make that a little bit bigger. First off, 180. That looks good to me. And slide that over a little bit. There we go. Looking good. And what else do I want to do here? Now, this is not an actual title I would use. Though I may watch my, I don't know, if it could lead to something, couldn't it? So let me see what else I can do with this. Let's make it stand out. Maybe we'll do like a warp. That's what we'll do. We'll pick some kind of warp text right here and we'll apply it, see what that looks like, the little arc looking thing. And let's see what that looks like. I think it's a little bit too much. I think I'm going to make it a little bit less of an arc. Yeah, felt like that. Yeah, that looks good. All right, so we're going to leave it like that and we can take it and adjust it, move it around depending on where we want it on the screen. So let me just move my cursor so that it will allow me to do that. I need that little plus thing. Yeah, there we go. I can slide it down right to here. That's good. All right, so we need to add a little bit more to it. Watch my, what am I going to put here? Let's see, what can I put? Let me grab a little bit more text and I'll stick it right down here, right below that. Watch my, I think I'm going to put a little bit more text. Okay, so let me grab some more text and we're going to stick something below this right here. Let me drag that down, get it all centered up so that I'm pointing at it. Kind of cool. And I'll put my new right there. Stick that right below it, get it all centered up. I'm going to change the color here to make this stand out a little bit more. How about that blue? Kind of doesn't look bad. It makes it pop a little bit with that yellow in the background. So there we go. And I'm, you know, not a professional at this at all. You know, this is my way of doing it. I make it a little bit wider to make it look standing out a little bit more. And then I'll put something down here. How about videos? Or what else? Now. Okay, make them do it now. All right, there we go. So watch my new videos now. I'm commanding them to do it and I'm pointing at it. And maybe I want to change the color of that. It seems like it blends in a little too much. What else could I do here? Maybe back to that red. Does it look too bad? So yeah, I could do that. Maybe black. See what that looks like. Watch my new videos now. So, so it does stand out. That's what I'm going for, right? I want it to stand out. So there I go. Alrighty, what else do I want to do with this? Let's see here. I think I'll go ahead and do another one. And this time, what we'll do is we'll grab one of my images that already have a background in them. So we don't have to, you know, colorize that background. So let me grab one. Got my new, got the same size in there. Got to open up an image. Let me find one down here that I want. And I took a bunch of them when I was shooting these videos. Let me see what else I've got down here. Okay. See how I hold my hands in different positions? This is really helpful. If you want to put some words on the screen later on, it kind of looks like you're holding the words. So let's do one like that, where it looks like I'm actually holding the words and people can actually see the words I'm holding. So let's go ahead and do that. So let's stick some stuff in here. There we go. The best we'll put at the top here. Let me slide that down just a touch. And we'll change the color of that to a fond of that color. Make it look brighter. Kind of like this yellow color. There it goes. It looks like it stands a little bit more against that great background. It's not too bad. Let me put something here between my hands. Grab a little bit more text. Stick that in there. We'll say the best videos to watch. That's a little bit too wide for my hands. So I'm gonna bring that font down a little bit right here. Just a touch, not a whole lot. Maybe 140. Looks like that would work in my hands there. There we go. Not bad, not bad. Getting there. Color wise, we probably ought to make a couple little changes here. We're gonna change that to, we'll try that red. That's not too bad. It shows up, get as bright as we possibly can. See what it looks like. Okay, the best videos to watch. We need to make it look a little fancier somehow. What can we do here? Let's take that best there. We'll do some little bending of the text. We'll make it bulge. Yeah, that bulge is kind of cool. And let's bring that down a little bit. Does some people worry like if you get font on your clothes or your arms or your head or whatever? I don't care. I mean, it doesn't matter to me. Kind of makes it look cooler. I think there's a little bit too much bulge to that though. Maybe I wanna bring that bulge down some so that it's not as big. So let me change that to maybe 30, 40. I don't know, 30% maybe would work. Let me try that and see if that looks better. I think I'm gonna like that better. Yeah, yeah, I like that a lot better. So yeah, the 30 works real well there. So now I've got this other one and I've got, let me slide that a little bit, just a touch. So now I've got one with a yellow background. I've got one with my real background here. You can do all kinds of stuff. I'm not a professional any stretch of the imagination like I told you at Photoshop. And I can do enough to get by. And the whole point in doing these thumbnails is just to get people to click. So you just want something bright, something that's gonna stand out, something that's gonna give them a little hint as to what is gonna be in your video. And of course, this is a terrible title right here. The best video is to watch. Nobody's gonna click on that. But if you have something about credit, it could be about credit. If you have something about making money, it could be that. If they're gonna learn something, if they're gonna get something, there's just all kinds of different things you can do to make this stuff stand out. There, I'm gonna put a little wave in that. There we go. Got a little wave going on. Looks a little bit different. So added that wave there. Makes it stand out a touch more. So there's plenty of things you can do, guys. You can play around with this all day long. Don't make a career out of this, right? You just wanna get your thumbnail done. You wanna get it done pretty quick. But you do wanna have thumbnails. You gotta have thumbnails. People won't click otherwise. They just won't do it. So let me just look at some of the other stuff I had in here. You know, I had all these different images. I wanted to show you. I mean, just all these different expressions. This is what you wanna do because you never know, you know, once you're done with the video, this could be a secret one right here. You never know once you're done with the video, how are you gonna use it? So taking all these different pictures and having all these possibilities are very handy. And you can always delete them. You know, it's no big deal. You know, it takes seconds to do a whole bunch of pictures. So I would suggest you do them while you're doing the video. You can blow out the background and use a color background or you can use the actual background that you took the picture against. Either way, make sure you do some different things with your hands and facial expressions. Your emotions so that you can use these to your advantage and make some really cool thumbnails. So here's the deal. If you employ all those things that I just showed you in the video and you work through all that and you get your colors right and you get your image right, you're gonna get more clicks. I mean, that's just a fact. And the fact is that if you get more clicks, your channel's gonna grow that much faster. Please do not skip the step of doing thumbnails. It's so, so important. You can also go to other channels that are getting a lot of subscribes, a lot of watch, all that type thing. And you can see what they did on their thumbnails. And generally they'll have a particular style they'll do, kind of you see it over and over again. So you may want to look at that. They don't copy somebody else's, but it will give you a good indication. Now, the one thing I'll tell you is a lot of people will do a title for the video and they try to put the same title in the thumbnail. And you don't need to do that. In this particular one, the title was kind of long. And if I put all of those words on the thumbnail, it would be something that would be hard to read. So I just pick two or three of the words and chop out the extra words. And keep in mind, YouTube does not optimize the words on your thumbnail. In other words, they don't even look at the words on your thumbnail. They could say something entirely different. YouTube doesn't know that. And you don't want to do that because that would be incorrect, that would be misleading. However, what I'm telling you is, it doesn't have to match. Please don't worry about that. Some of our titles are super long and that would be the worst thing you could do to put a super long title on a thumbnail. Now, I hope you enjoyed this video. And if you did, make sure you subscribe down there. Hit that subscribe button. Next to the subscribe button is a bell like this. And if you smash that bell, guess what? You'll be notified when I do new videos, but only if you turn on all your notifications. It'll ask you for that option. You can become part of the Fisher family and a VIP on this channel so you know about these videos before anybody else does. That's pretty cool stuff. Don't forget, put your comments below. If you've been working on thumbnails, if you had issues with thumbnails, what software are you using, any questions you have, please put it in the comments section below. Don't forget, I've got a $97 Ecommerce course. You can get absolutely free. There's a link in the description down there. Grab that link, click on it, go off and learn and become more successful online. Thank you so much for listening to this video and I'll see you in the next one. Hey, thanks for watching my video. Don't forget to subscribe to my channel and click that little bell right here and you can be notified every time I do a new video. Also, click on one of those videos there. Keep watching on my channel.