How to make custom YouTube thumbnails - Quick and Easy

So I fumbled with one key tenets of YouTube videos, amongst every other thing. That is the first impression you might make, or might not - the humble thumbnail.

It's usually what grabs a viewer's attention, almost always more than the title of the video.

For this I thought I'd take an existing video 'How to fix microphone not being picked up on Windows 10' that I have which has an auto generated thumbnail.

The basic setup is as follows, (I use Photoshop, it can easily be set in any other image editing software, see link below for .PSD file):

Width: 1920 px
Height: 1080 px
Resolution: 150 pixels/inch

The Width x Height will automatically take care of the proportions of the image. And the resolution is roughly double 72 pixels/inch - which is generically what images are set to for web based formatting, i.e. online display etcetera. I found this made the text and image assets very small when used as a thumbnail, almost to the point it defeated the purpose of a custom thumbnail to begin with.

Setting resolution at 150 pixels (which is half the industry requirement for anything that is to be printed 300 dpi, roughly translated) ensures that the graphics and text would be of a sufficiently large enough size and quality. You are more than free to go higher than 150, but definitely not smaller though.

Photoshop Template File

Photoshop .PSD file that you can use as a template with placeholders/guidelines you can use as a makeshift grid to make adjustments how you see fit.

Once you've settled on the text, image and layout:

• Save the PSD
• Flatten all the layers
• Save as Jpeg or PNG

That's all there's to it, now you can upload it as a thumbnail for your YouTube video. Here is the new thumbnail I created:

And this is how it looked previously using a thumbnail that was auto generated, which tends to get lost in most settings where it would show up:

In video promotion:

In the up next list & YouTube search results:

So now it will have more of a presence amongst all the other videos. Happy hunting.