Name: make a custom YouTube thumbnail
Prep time: 5 min
Total time: 5 min
Ingredients: gimp

In this tutorial we will learn how to make a simple YouTube video thumbnail, using the free software GIMP.

Here are some cool examples of custom YouTube thumbnails i found on YouTube:

Open a picture (mostly a screenshot from your video) in GIMP.

For this tutorial i will use a random picture.

Start with a large enough picture to make your custom YouTube thumbnail. To make a good thumbnail, it must be as large as possible (usually 1280 x 720 px or bigger) and have a 16:9 aspect ratio.

Click the

icon to start the text tool, in order to add text in the picture.

a. Click somewhere in the picture, then you should see a text box appearing.
b. Type the text you want to add in your YouTube thumbnail (mostly the video title). For this tutorial i will just enter

MY CUSTOM THUMBNAIL

Make the thumbnail's text more easy to read by writing it all in CAPITAL LETTERS

Enter the first letters of the font you want to use, then you should see a menu with all fonts available from your computer. Here i will use

Arial Bold

.

If you don't know any font name, just enter "a" or "b" so you can still choose a font.

a. Expand the text area by moving the gray boxes around the text area.
b. Select all the text.
c. Use the up arrow button to enlarge the font until it covers a big part of the picture.

The bigger the text is, the easier it will be to read, especially when thumbnails are displayed in a small size, like in the related section

Choose a color by clicking the color button.

Choose a color that is not very much used in the picture, the text will be easier to read!

Transform the text layer into a simple layer by right clicking on it, then

Discard Text Information

Expand the layer's dimensions by right clicking on it, then

Layer to Image Size

Now we need to make a black border around the text. For this, we need to duplicated this layer.

Duplicate the layer by right clicking it, then

Duplicate layer

We use the text to make a selection, so we can work on it to make the black border around the text.

Do it by right clicking the layer, then

Alpha to Selection

Be sure to be focused on the second layer, which will be used to make the black border, so it must be under the first layer (which will stay orange)

To make the black border, we will just use the text layer we previously duplicated, but in bigger size. To make the same text in bigger size, we made a selection from it in step 10, now we need to grow it.

To grow the selection, just click