How to make better YouTube Thumbnails

0:00so one of the most unique things about the youtube platform is thumbnails tic toc auto plays instagram pretty much auto plays all the other platforms feed you content and you're kind of already consuming it before you know it but on youtube the audience actually has to make the conscious decision to click on a video in order to watch it and that decision is largely based on the thumbnail when we first started making videos we wouldn't really put much thought into it it was like make a cool video and then right before upload pick a screenshot but over the past year a lot of the growth on our channel has largely been

0:31because we've prioritized making thumbnails we've realized that the difference between a thousand views and a million views can come down to a thumbnail we also realize this because the thumbnail king himself mr beast and his team told us we need to make better thumbnails hey what's up boys have you seen conan's name yeah yeah you love me i know i tell them to make the thumbnails better all the time and the most important thing we've learned from the thumbnail king himself is that if they don't click they don't watch we're at a point now where we won't even pick up a camera until we've fully come up with the title and

1:04thumbnail that we're gonna use for a video and we will even go as far as to produce the thumbnail for the video before we actually shoot the video that's because if we can't come up with a good compelling thumbnail that would make someone click most likely that video won't even get seen by the people that we want to see it and the importance of the thumbnail is wrapped up into one term that a lot of us youtube creators know and that's ctr stands for click through rate so basically that is the percentage of people who have seen your thumbnail and decide to click on it the majority of youtube channels range

1:35between 2 and 10 and if you're anywhere near that 10 marker meaning 10 of people that saw your thumbnail actually clicked on it that's a pretty good indication that you're doing something right in studying which one of our thumbnails are closer to 10 ctr and which ones are not we've come up with three components that make a really good thumbnail number one the thumbnail has to stop your scroll what that means is people are scrolling through social media platforms so fast and even on youtube they're scrolling through their subscription feed or their home feed or the trending page or they're seeing very small frames and they're recommended it has to stop them

2:10in their tracks for us we found that a big face in the frame works really well symmetry also has shown to work really well for us what's important here is that you have a high-res photo and that it's aesthetically pleasing and that it's loud enough or controversial enough or just captures attention it has to stop someone's scroll now once you've stopped someone's scroll you have a split second to make sure that they know what the story could be and that's the next thing we've seen that good thumbnails have they tell a story so you have to set up the entire video in a single frame it's the ultimate storytelling

2:42constraint you have to put your entire act one the entire reason why someone should watch to the end in one single frame and that frame is your thumbnail and number three a good thumbnail either begs a question or suggests transformation the audience has to know why they should invest their time in this video either they have a question after seeing your thumbnail or they're excited to see something transform okay so what we're gonna show you guys we're gonna take some of our worst performing thumbnails and try and make them better thumbnails according to those three things that we just mentioned to you now to do that we're gonna be using

3:14skylum's photo editing software luminar ai it is a photo editing software that makes photo editing really easy and honestly just a lot of fun like you can do some incredible amazing things samir does not make our thumbnails because he doesn't know how to do any photo editing wow that's just for truth but now honestly yesterday he spent the entire day basically making thumbnails and he was sending them to me last night at 11 30. which is typically past my bedtime but yes i was making thumbnails colin feels like you're attacking me right now i'm trying to express how exciting making thumbnails was for you yesterday because of luminar ai

3:49i mean i'm gonna go as far as to say that i think this software is the ultimate thumbnail creation software for youtube creators all right so what we've done is we've pulled in some screenshots from our old videos that have terrible performing thumbnails so that we could try and recreate them but before we do that we want to quickly show you a photo and show you some of the features that luminar ai has because it's truly incredible what you can do this is a drone shot that was taken by our editor jesse here in venice and we are going to edit it so first and foremost for me again i'm not

4:23really like familiar with editing software so what's really nice is they have these templates so the ai tells you what it recommends for this photo let's just try the first one here all right so in one click this is basically editing the photo as it sees fits that's pretty cool that's really cool so already you can see the difference here this is edited and that's not okay what gets really interesting here is some of these ai features this has to be one of the coolest things that i've ever seen in any software you can actually change the way the sky looks this is a nighttime shot so let's take a

4:57look at like what does starry night one look like i mean what's crazy is that it also mattes out the image around the palm trees the flag you can see there a few clicks and we've just made like a really dynamic image i mean look at that that looks insane let's do a sunset wow to be honest that looks really real did luminar add the helicopter yeah i think so right look at that that is insane and again as you can see before after before after how long has it been i mean i know we've edited this down but i think it's been 90 seconds let's move on to now a thumbnail another

5:35one of our videos is about skydiving uh and we actually do have photos like you know when you jump out of the plane and the person like takes the shots so we have photos but we didn't use a photo we use a screenshot because that's what we were doing at that time which again is not advised so we're actually going to take one of those photos and edit it and see what it looks like so first and foremost that's adding light to both of our faces which is crazy that it knows where the faces are yeah already we have a much better thumbnail this enhanced ai feature

6:06i honestly don't know exactly what it's doing it i guess it's just enhancing yeah you just trust but you just trust the software to know what to enhance which is really cool all right so another thing we want to do here is we want to mess with the sky there's a lot of sky to work with in this one crazy that's crazy it's going to replace it it's going to replace the entire sky so that feels like it's uh i mean that's already cooler the one with the chemtrail was interesting because you would assume that there's a plane there's an airplane this one yeah yeah and we could actually put a

6:40plane right there too right so we could go now we can place an object let's place a plane make it small enough so another thing we need to do here is change the composition right because it needs to be 16 by nine boom all right that's such a better thumbnail that's a better thumbnail before after before after so definitely feels like it it could stop your scroll there's a big face and screen there's some symmetry here and again this frame tells a story all right so this is a screen grab that we took from a video called colin 6000 mile surprise where he goes home to surprise his parents the

7:20thumbnail right now for this video i am in a airplane train uh basically like a train car and you can only see my feet you can't even see my face you have no idea really what's going on so we grabbed a screenshot from the video where my face is more visible and i'm actually on a plane so you can tell that i'm traveling i'm going somewhere to surprise someone all right so first and foremost we want to get some more light on colin's face so we're going to go here to the portrait section we're going to click face and the first thing you have is face light

7:47and so the ai is actually going to be able to tell where colin's face is and add more light to his face have we enhanced yet no so we're going to enhance okay so we want to change what's in this window we want to make it look like a more compelling sky something that obviously feels like he's in midair there's such little horizon here that we actually need to use this paint tool and paint a mask inside of here all right so now that we have the window matted out we're going to add a brand new sky wow okay so that looks that may be too

8:24bright that's crazy that's crazy that feels like uh like this this to me feels like it would be a video about dreams why you shouldn't fall asleep on a plane or what happens when you fall asleep on a plane let's try this i like that i like that do a little before and after here before after that's insane from being totally dark and unsaturated the window's blown out to like a much better image and that's a much more interesting act one for a story because you can tell i'm on a plane clearly i'm going somewhere then when you see in the title that it's a surprise

9:00it's much more enticing to click and see who i surprise what the travel is actually like all right what else we got what else can we luminar ai as a verb yes what else can we luminar ai all right home to india this is a video that i have about taking a trip with my dad back to village in india it doesn't have a great thumbnail so we took this screenshot uh which is also not a great screen very low quality image super low res uh but let's see what we can do alright ready before after that's wild right so much better wow that is such a better

9:38thumbnail okay so hopefully you learned a lot about youtube thumbnails in this video and you saw how impactful luminar ai can be to totally change around your thumbnails again i'm not someone who's really familiar with editing software or good at photo editing but i felt like i was like a wizard in luminar yeah like i was able to do things that i couldn't dream of it does feel like that it feels insane yeah it's just a crazy experience it's like you are getting on a rocket ship and you don't know where it's going to take you but it ends up taking you to some pretty incredible places like

10:11yeah it feels like you have super powers and again like when you really get into this career of being a creator you start to realize how important thumbnails are and this tool will drastically change our ability to make compelling thumbnails as well as reduce the time it takes to make those yeah so in the beginning of the video we mentioned click-through rate which is incredibly important but one thing we didn't mention is avd that's average view duration that's the other metric that we take a hard look at for all of our videos that's the average amount of time that someone watches your video and the goal is that

10:41you have a high avd because you want people to watch all the way until the end like this point a video right now so not only do you have to make a really good thumbnail that entices someone to click but you also have to back it up with a good story so thanks so much to skylum for sponsoring this video and for giving us luminar ai because it's one of the most fun tools that i've used and if you want to check out luminar ai for yourself we put a link in the description if you are a youtube creator i'd highly suggest at least trying it out

11:08and checking out how you can completely transform your thumbnails thanks for watching this video make sure to subscribe to our channel if you don't already like this video because it helps us in the youtube algorithm and lastly check out the link in the description for luminar ai i got a few things i'm just happy