How to Make a YouTube Thumbnail

Hi it's George here to empower your inner video creator so if you want to grow your channel you're gonna have to do a bit more than just create great videos such as creating great thumbnails because having a great the thumbnail is just as important as having a great video because this is the first impression YouTubers will get.

Video Watch Now
 When viewing your video so before I go into my tips on how to make a thumbnail make sure your YouTube the account is verified in order for you to make a custom thumbnail believe it or not you can actually make great thumbnails in filmora so if you don't have it already you can try it for free by clicking on the link in the description box below if you already have your own way of making thumbnails it's all good because these tips apply to pretty much any software.

So without further ado here are three of my best tips on how to make a thumbnail in Fillmore [Music] number one resolution even though you can pretty much upload any resolution thumbnail to YouTube you may have problems with its appearance, if it's not quite right in order for your thumbnail not to get cropped or stretched make sure its resolution is 1920 by 1080 or 16 by 9 aspect ratio is the golden standard that.

We use in order for our thumbnails to be displayed the best number to optimize for mobile devices a lot of people may not be aware of this but make sure to consider all the different types of devices that you tubers will consume your content on these range from desktops tablets laptops or cell phones and these all have drastically different screen sizes.

so you're gonna want to make sure to make your thumbnail look good across all devices and since most people watch videos on their phone nowadays make sure that your thumbnail looks good when it's really small one surefire way to make sure your thumbnail is great for mobile is to first upload your video and thumbnail and set it to unlisted and then view it on your phone and make sure that everything looks good when it's small number three make it standout use bold colors or unique designs to make your thumbnail stand out some of our thumbnails perform really really well because there are colorful bold and exciting while other ones.

 when utilized white space in an interesting way to create a unique design so that our thumbnails pop up when they're viewed against a bunch of other people's videos you don't necessarily need to add text to your thumbnail if you do add it make sure that it actually adds value to the title of your video alright so we've recently made a green screen tutorial for how to come out of your screen like in the Ring movies and all we really did for that thumbnail was use the screenshot from the video skin.
so here's a screenshot but after reviewing a bit and seeing its performance on YouTube we realized it could probably be optimized so I thought I'd share with you some tips on how you can do that in filmora and you can make a really great thumbnail so I have it loaded in the first thing I noticed is that I don't really like the crop.

I want it to be more zoomed in because there's these extra items down in the corners that I don't necessarily want in my thumbnail so in order to crop you have to go find the crop and zoom tool and while you clicked on the item in your timeline and it'll open up this window and so now I'm going to want to take the corners of this crop tool and find the spot that I like better and a good rule of thumb is to have the subject of your attention somewhere in the middle of your frame something like this looks good to me all right so once I've got that cropped the next thing.

I want to look at is some filters and Lamora actually has some amazing filters for enhancing the look the feel the mood of your video thumbnails so one that I really liked I remember writing it down it's called the vignette radius and you'll see when I add this on top of the thumbnail it creates even more darkness to help enhance that horror mood and horror feel we want for this thumbnail so you know that's pretty much as easy as you want to make it but you might want to add some text you don't necessarily need it in this case but if you were to add text.

I'll show you how you can do that so if the lure has all these texts in the text tab like titles and stuff you can use these for your thumbnail the one at the very bottom is like the most basic and I find it to be really useful for thumbnails so I'm going to add it on there title 41 and double click on it and you can see it shows up on the screen and now I'm going to drag it around to find a spot for it and obviously.

I don't want it to say lorem ipsum so I'm going to put something more related to my thumbnail the ring effect now I don't like that font either it's not very scary so I'd probably go in there and choose one that's a bit more suitable what was the one that I liked I think it was called a polar one mmm there you go so you might have to move around your text after you found one that you like might even resize it a bit and let me show you what else you can do to make your text pop out so you can go to this Advanced tab here and it'll give you a bunch of text editing effects.

So things like you can change the color of your fill you know you could add a border you can add a shadow too so what I'll show you is I prefer maybe a border for this one so I'll choose like black color and you can change the size there you know like I said before if you want your thumbnail to stand out on mobile you're going to want to have a bit bigger text so sometimes it helps to have a pretty thick border so that people can see what your thumb thumbnail title is when it's really small so that some that looks pretty good to me I might adjust my shadow as well but maybe because.

I have a border you can't really see much of the shadow so maybe it doesn't even do that much but if I didn't want a border and I wanted a shadow instead that could work and I can mess with the different options here to make that text and out oh that's pretty good so once you're happy with your the thumbnail you're going to want to take a snapshot and this will save it till filmora and to do that all you have to do is click on this little camera icon here it's called the snapshot and that'll be saved to your media library you can go back to your media library and you can find your snapshot there oh except I realized this time it didn't save me with my text.

So I actually have to go back and make sure that what the snapshot I'm saving has text on it and there it is it showed up and you can right-click and find exactly where this file location is on your computer if you want to upload it to YouTube okay so for the ringing example we may or may not choose to use the thumbnail with the text on it depending on how it looks for mobile but let's say you really want to use text how can you make it really effective in femoral.

I'm going to show you another example from a video we did of simple video editing cuts and we took a simple picture of scissors to symbolize the cut and then all we did is we added the text preset double-clicked on it wrote some text that you know enhances the title so in this one we put five essential cuts resize it and you know I want to use a custom font for this one so there's if you install your own fonts it'll automatically show up in filmora so I'm choosing Mark and I am going to see that that's pretty much already good maybe.

I'll make it a bit larger to fit the thumbnail but since I can't really tell exactly what it's gonna look like yet I'm gonna go into the Advanced tab and maybe I'm gonna use change the color of the title use black and how am I gonna blend it back into the background well maybe I'll use a white border so you can do that pretty simple and again you can change the size of your border and resize where that fits I find that sometimes having it close to the middle and having a good size for your title will make it a really good thumbnail and stand out against the competition all right let's see what that looks like that's not too bad and again got a click okay to get out of that text window and then save your thumbnail.

Click the snapshot button here by your preview window and there you go it's been saved to your media library that's it well that's it for I hope this video helps you make better thumbnails can be pretty tricky to make but they're a very important part of YouTube so if you want to succeed putting is just as much time on them as you do your videos.