MAKE THUMBNAILS for FREE on Macbook Pro with KEYNOTE | Apple Mac for YouTube 2020

Can you make YouTube thumbnails for FREE on your Macbook Pro? Yes!
I use Keynote - a free powerpoint-style program from the Apple App Store.
I show you how I make my YouTube channel thumbnails in case there's something you want to try.
Get Keynote for free here: https://www.apple.com/keynote/

MAKE THUMBNAILS for FREE on Macbook Pro with KEYNOTE | Apple Mac for YouTube 2020



0:00 MAKE THUMBNAILS for FREE on Macbook Pro with KEYNOTE
0:16 HOW TO DOWNLOAD KEYNOTE FOR FREE ON AN APPLE MACBOOK
0:32 HOW TO SET SLIDE SIZE IN APPLE KEYNOTE APP
0:50 CHOOSE PRESENTATION SLIDE STYLE IN MAC KEYNOTE PROGRAM
1:05 HOW TO SCREENGRAB A FRAME FROM MY YOUTUBE VIDEO USING QUICKTIME PLAYER
1:30 HOW TO FIND A GOOD FRAME FOR YOUTUBE VIDEO THUMBNAIL
1:55 HOW TO CAPTURE A SCREENSHOT FRAME ON MACBOOK PRO shift-cmd-5, capture selected window
2:45 HOW TO CHOOSE A GOOD FRAME FOR YOUTUBE THUMBNAIL
3:10 IMPORT SCREENSHOT INTO KEYNOTE TO CREATE YOUTUBE THUMBNAIL
3:25 KEYNOTE TIPS: ZOOM OUT OF SLIDE AND MAKE PICTURE BIGGER ON SLIDE
4:30 HOW TO MAKE PICTURES LOOK BETTER IN KEYNOTE - USING ENHANCE, EXPOSURE, SATURATION https://youtu.be/VhmAS8tkF44
5:18 HOW TO SHARPEN AN IMAGE IN KEYNOTE
5:50 HOW TO ADD CLIP ART ICONS AND SHAPES IN KEYNOTE
6:15 MAKE A COLOURED BAR OR TEXT BOX IN KEYNOTE SLIDE
6:25 HOW TO ADD TEXT TO A KEYNOTE SLIDE - RESIZE, BOLD, FONT
7:08 HOW TO MOVE TEXT LAYER BACKWARD OR FORWARD IN A KEYNOTE SLIDE
7:50 SAVE OR EXPORT KEYNOTE SLIDE AS A PICTURE FILE - JPEG, JPG, PNG, TIFF

TRANSCRIPT: (CLICK PLAY ON THE VIDEO ABOVE)
Hello it's been a while since I've made a video like this!
this is how I make my YouTube channel video thumbnails for free on a macbook pro on keynote
this is a great system for making thumbnails really easily if you have an apple mac, here is an app or program called keynote
keynote is completely free and I'm going to show you what it can do
now keynote is the apple mac powerpoint so this is the app where you can make slides for presentations

THIS IS THE TRANSCRIPT - CLICK PLAY ON THE VIDEO ABOVE!

now really handily it makes slides in only two sizes
the first size is 4:3 - which is the shape of an old tv if you're old like me, and the other shape is wide 16:9 and that is the shape that YouTube studio wants the thumbnails to be delivered in
The first thing we need to do is to choose a presentation
I go for basic white or basic black.
Let's go for white and hit "create"
the first thing you are presented with is one slide with this kind of template
what i'm going to do is just click on each of these elements and delete them
so the next thing I do in my workflow is to choose the thumbnails to actually choose a frame I want to grab and put some text on
for that I go down to quicktime player and I open the video that I want to take screen grabs from
I'm using two fingers on the mouse pad to spin through the video and what i'm looking for is a nice shot
something that's funny maybe something like that or that or that
that's a nice shot, isn't it?
So if I wanted to grab that frame, firstly you can check either side of it if there's a better frame just use your left or right keys on your keyboard - so i'm going forward.
let's go backwards
something like that
we've chosen a nice frame that we want to use as our main thumbnail
the next thing you can do on the mac is to hold down shift command 5 and it brings up the screenshot thing
I don't know what it's called
because i'm recording this screen that's why it says stop screen recording there and I will go for "capture selected window"
it will grab that 16:9 window and then when you move the cursor onto the window it brings up a little camera icon and we'll just click that

I don't know if you could hear that, it has grabbed the shot for me and what I do is I grab a few of them like that
that's quite funny, so shift cmd 5, "capture selected window" and we just do one more shift command 5
capture selected window, so now I have a selection of pictures that I want to use for my thumbnail
Next I go to the folder where those screenshots were saved and what I like to do is to just check through them so I'll use this option and because it presents it as a smaller thumbnail it's really much easier to see which images have instant impact.
leave a comment below: which one would you choose?
would you choose one or two or three?
I have prepared this thumbnail before so i'm choosing option four which is this picture here.
the next thing we can do is to drag that screenshot into the slide
it's so easy, you just drag it from finder into the slide
there we go so I can close finder now
now if you're not familiar with keynote - and I wasn't - it took a lot of experimenting
what we can do is Zoom out because this is the exact size of the slide and I just want to be able to see the edges
let's go to 50 here as you can see it's a bit small it doesn't quite fill the frame so I'm going to grab the edge and make it big
I tend to make faces on my thumbnails super huge
you'll have your own preferences I know leave me uh comments to let me know what thumbnail tips you have
I'm gonna Zoom out even further just so I can see what I've got to play with
go really big

what I love about this system is that keynote shows your slides on the left hand side so over here you can see while you're resizing the photo you can see the effect it's having on a thumbnail and I find that really useful
see that is okay but it's not quite as impactful as that or even that
the next thing I would do is to import all the other elements that I want to to put in here so I've got a logo for the show and I'll just drag that in exactly the same way and I've jumped ahead because what I would do before adding anything else is to make this picture even more impactful
there are all kinds of tools
click on the picture on the slide and then over on the right hand side there are these tools that can help make your pictures sing
I'm going to click on image and down here can you see it says "enhance"
I'm going to hit enhance and watch what happens to Elle's face when I hit enhance
there
it's a bit warmer isn't it
there are some other tools as well on exposure you can increase that to go all the way up to 100
that's probably a bit too washed out but what I like to do is to look at the thumbnail on the top left hand corner
let's jump over there and as I bring down the exposure you can see the effect it has on the thumbnail so we put the exposure at 10 that sort of helped it and next to enhance there's this advanced button here and you have all kinds of faders to fiddle with.
I'm going to put sharpness on because this was a Zoom call so it wasn't very sharp but look what happens if I whack up the sharpness
it's about 55 maybe even 70
that to me looks so much better than the soft look at zero so I'm gonna make that really sharp so that it really pops in the thumbnail
that's great and then I'll hit enhance
the next thing you'll want to do is to add some text or an icon even
there are some things to play with on "shape"
you have all kinds of shapes so if I wanted to grab oh I don't know the toilet no let's get I don't know just say a magnet I could put a big magnet there
I don't know why

you can change the colour over here so I can make it a red magnet or an orange one
that's been really useful but the main reason that shapes are useful in keynote is that we can make a rectangle and we can make that any color you like and we could turn that into a text box
so let's put some text on
if you click on text - you can't see - it's tiny!
let's make this bigger
i'm going to click out of this text box and click back in and it brings up these dots where you can resize the text, so let's just write... I don't know... "hello"
and we want to make it bolder so select all and click on bold
and let's make it really bright - garish yellow - so you can click on text colors here
I'll go down to yellow and there are all kinds of options that you can experiment with so let's put it on the bottom, put that at the top, and we can make this coloured box bigger and reposition it
Leave a comment if you have any questions
there's just one other amazing thing that I can show you with keynote.
all of the elements that we put onto this slide you can move them forwards or backwards so if I wanted to bring this logo down and have this in front of the hello
we've got the logo selected, you can see the white dots around the edge up here on the top right hand side
we have style, image, and arrange
now with a range you can move things backwards so the logo is now behind that photo of Elle.
I can move it forwards so there it's appeared again, and move it forward again, so it's in front of the colour box but behind the text and I can hit it again to bring it all the way to the front
Or with "back" and "front", I can jump that image right to the back so it's now behind the photo
we can't see it
or all the way to the front
the only thing we have to do now is to export this thumbnail so you just go up to file - export
we're going to export it as "images" and you have all kinds of choices
jpeg png or tiff
let's do a jpeg and it's slide number one so we're going to export slide number one to one
click next
let's call it Elle thumbnail and then hit export
let's go into that folder and for some reason keynote exports images within another folder
so there's the folder there: Elle thumbnail and that jpeg is now ready to upload to your video as your thumbnail
I absolutely love this system because the video is in the same place and easy to grab and as you can see it's really easy to bounce files into and out of keynote
you just drag them in
if you've reached this point of the video and it's helped why not hit the thumbs up and if you're feeling even kinder hit the subscribe button that will really help keep me going and good luck with your thumbnails
I hate them!
I hate making them!
Can you please help my daddy get 10,000 subscribers. Just click in his face. Thanks bye!
Alright, this is gonna be the proper one, right?

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