5 THUMBNAIL EDITING HACKS IN CANVA | Glow effect, Blurry background, Outlining, AI Visuals, etc.

[Music] here are five YouTube thumbnail editing hacks that you could do in canva from creating an outline around a person to making it look like they're glowing and a few other tricks that I use to really make my thumbnails pop and stand out and look out of this world as always time Stamps will be in the description below let's jump over to the laptop and get into it jumping into canva we're going to create our design and this is going to be a YouTube thumbnail with the dimensions 1280 by 720 some of the features I'm

going over today are included in the free canva plan and some of them are part of the canva Pro Plan so I tried to add a little bit of variety I do have a link below where you can do a 30-day free canva trial so you can use that not sponsored by canva but I love canva so I have affiliate links for it anywh who the first thing we're going to do is upload the pose that I did so every time I film a YouTube video I actually record my myself doing poses before I film

the actual Talking part so I'll press record I'll do a few poses and then I'll go back to that video and I'll screenshot the poses that I like so this is just a screenshot of me doing pose that I want to use for the thumbnail so the first thing that I want to show you in canva is something really cool where you can like change your location you don't have to be in a fany schmancy place with a fany schmancy backdrop really all you need is some good lighting a good shot of you in your

face and you could be anywhere you want in canva so this is something that I like to use so basically we're going to click on our image press edit and we're going to press the background remover the background remover is a pro feature but if you don't have the pro version you can actually use this website here this is pixel.com remove dasb background so you'll upload your photo here and it'll remove the background for you and then you'll save that to your computer and then upload it to canvas so as you can see here my

background has been removed and this is my new photo we love it I'm going to crop it in because it's taking up the entire space and I want to be able to play with this section A little bit more so crop it in now we can actually change our location so I'm going to go to elements and I'm going to search for aesthetic office search we're going to look in the photos and then you could choose any of these as your backdrop so I really like this one if it has a crown it's pro version

if there is no Crown it's completely free I'm just going to drag this onto the background position to the back so that I'm in the front and of course this looks a little bit like oh that looks edited so I'm going to edit the image and add a little bit of blur to my background image so we're going to go to adjust and see all add a little bit of blur here so now it looks like oh she was just at the front of the image we're going to get into this one as well a

little bit later where we're talking about the glow effect but this is looking up a dark office scheme is one that complements that glow effect really really well so we're going to actually go to photos choose our Moody office let's cover up that person and then that's something that you can play around with now if you're somebody who is not 100% comfortable with design whether it's for your thumbnails Banner images or you just want to have templates that you can play with I have an amazing resource from today's sponsor HubSpot HubSpot created a free resource

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my pinned comment select download now for free all you have to do is enter your name and email and it'll be sent directly to your inbox all right let's jump to the next hack going into the next hack we're going to create a border or an outline around my self- posing because obviously this kind of looks a little bit edited so how can we add more Dimension I'm going to bring this over to Let's duplicate this page get rid of that background and here's another just like fun little hack um I actually have a screenshot

of my regular background and this is just when I pressed record on that posing video I made sure that I was not in the frame so that I could have have just like the plain background and I could move my pose wherever I want and have access to like any portion of the background so that's just a little fun fact is getting a screenshot of your background if you're going to use it we're going to edit it blur it out again we just going to do a little bit of a blur so let's just do

four and now we're going to edit the pose so this we're going to make sure this picture is selected and press edit image now there are two different editing Tools in canva you have their newer way to edit I'm on the old way to edit because my computer kept glitching with their new way so fingers crossed my computer does not glitch since I switched back to what I usually use so we're going to go to shadows and select glow in the new version of canva they have one called outline so you can literally click outline

and you'll be able to have an outline around yourself but we don't have that outline option here so we're going to select glow and you see how there's those three lines we're going to click glow again again and it's going to give us some more editing options so I'm going to make the glow a little bit bigger and we're going to bring the transparency all the way we want to see 100% of it whatever border you want I usually do a white border around myself and instead of blurring it which has that glow effect I'm

going to bring the blur down so it's more of a harsh line and now it looks like there is an outline surrounding me you could play with the size here I like to keep it kind of small dainty and maybe around seven and press apply and that is how you can create the outline around a person in canva now if you have the new editor in canva and you want to add this outline all you would have to do is select the image press edit photo you're going to go to Shadows select outline and then

you could play with like the size of the outline the color blur amount and all the things so similar steps but yeah that's the new editor before jumping into our third hack if you're somebody who is looking to grow on YouTube I want to let you know about my ultimate YouTube starter workbook it is completely free and I'll link it down below basically this workbook is everything that you need to know for starting a channel and growing your channel on YouTube it's going to go over how you could set up your channel for Success implementing

SEO keywords all the things even equipment that you could be using and of course how to properly do your YouTube research so you're coming up with endless content ideas so again this is completely free I will link down below and let's jump back into the video okay for our third hack if you want to add a little bit more Dimension and really make yourself pop out of the background this is something that I use a lot when maybe I don't have the original background and I have other elements in my background for example duplicate this

page background element that I use a lot is the Instagram looking background for all of my Instagram tip videos so I'm just going to look up Instagram and I'm going to pull like a plain colored one like this this move this to the background there we go that's the one okay so like this background let's use this background as an example I'm going to drag myself down because you can see the outline on the bottom I don't want to see that so I'm going to drag it down but what we're going to do is we're

going to press edit image again we're going to go back to shadows and we already have the outline here so we're going to press glow again and it's going to give us like a second layer and now we have that dark shadow behind myself and this is making it look like I'm kind of popping out from the background going to bring the blur up I want to see it no that I want like a nice subtle Fade to it yeah around 50 you can make the blur more drastic so it kind of like Blends in

with the background really it's depending on your liking I will do something like oops that and apply so now we're really popping from the thumbnail now if if you want to create this pop effect in the new editor what you're going to do is do the same steps or follow the same steps you would to create the outline and then you're going to duplicate your pose the pose that is in the back let's play with that one so let me actually move this front one over we're going to edit this one we're going to press

edit photo we're going to go to Shadows again we're going to press glow this time we're going to do a black glow you can see my computer is glitching so I can't see what I'm editing for some reason my computer doesn't like the new version of canva which is why I showed everything on the old one but basically let me bring the intensity down a little bit we're going to bring the blur amount down the size down pretend we can see what we're doing once I save it you'll see okay perfect so pretend there was

a little bit less intensity and then we're just going to layer them on top of each other so I'm going to put this here and now we have that pop Effect one pose is doing the outline and the other pose is doing the glow we layer them on top top and they're kind of popping okay for our next hack I want to show you how you could get even more of a glow kind of like an AI feel going on behind you so we're going to actually go with this one because I feel like a

lot of the AI thumbnails they have a dark Moody background and that's something that I want to play around with so the first thing we're going to do this is kind of like a three-step one first thing we're going to do we're going to add our glow to the image so we're going to do Shadows we're going to do glow instead of a dark shadowy glow we're going to do the white one again but we're going to keep it blurry because that's the glow effect that we kind of want to go for we're going to

bring that size up so it's a little bit more dramatic transparency up and again this is something that you could just like continue to play with depending on your liking and what you feel makes the most sense with your thumbnail this is a glow that I'm really liking so I like this glow for right now I'm going to press apply now we're going to continue to add layers to this so I'm actually going to edit the background image I want to blur it a little bit o yeah there we go now we're talking and then

in this elements section we're actually going to search glow under Graphics we're going to select see all and I feel like blue is a really popular color that we see in those like AI cool looking thumbnails so we're going to make this pretty big have it centered right behind me and then we're going to press position move it backwards so it's right behind my pose and we're going to actually do that again this time with white so we're going to put white centered a little bit smaller than the blue one so there's kind of like

a Blue to White fade position backwards now it's right behind me now we have a nice glow eye my outline the border of myself is glowing and even adding more glow effects behind me is something really fun to play around with okay now for our fifth hack we're going to add even more layers to this we're going to keep going off of this AI kind of outof world feel and add some particles or even texture to the thumbnail I feel like texture is a huge thing with making thumbnails stand out I love adding it depending

of course on the topic so what I'm going to look up is actually particles see all and I'm going to scroll through this till I find something that I like I think I like this one make it nice and big copy paste bring it to this side this time we're going to actually lip it put my thing down flip it and reverse it line it up a little bit there there we go so now it kind of looks like it's like the mirror reverse image of each other before I move it behind myself I think

I'm going to play with the opacity a little bit so it's kind of a little bit more Blended so transparency bring that down transparency bring that down now we'll position it backwards position backwards so that it's behind me now we have a little bit more of that like sci-fi space feel to it again you could continue to play with this with other canva features I always use the transparency effect so that it seems a little bit more natural in a specific thumbnail but that's just another way that you could add more layers and dimension now

if you want to create this glow effect in the new version this is what you're going to do you're going to select the pose edit photo select Shadows glow you're going to make sure it's white of course we can't see what we're doing cuz my computer doesn't like the new version of canva We're going to make sure there's a blur and yeah and that's the glow effect in the new version now if you want to take this an even step further and you're making like a AI specific related video let's move all this over a

little bit maybe you want yourself your face to be AI generated or to have an AI feel to it I don't recommend using canvas's AI image Creator because it just is absolute trash no offense let's see if I have it here uh I think it's on the advanced one yeah it's on their new version but what you could do this is not free but you could use Remini this is like a AI photo generator and you could try it for free so what you would do is upload your pose to Rini or the photo that

you want edited and it's going to kind of AI generate you so I'm going to drop a file let's say this is the file I want to play with and then as you see this is the before the file that I uploaded did not have a background to it so it's just like me my pose with a white outlines this is before no filters No Effects you could see more texture on my skin and then when I swipe to the after it first of all it added a background of my YouTube desk which is creepy

and scary and terrifying and weird but you can see my face has a little bit more cartoon characteristics to it you could even add a little bit more layers there so if I wanted to beautify say like movie apply and then it like definitely added a little bit of a contortion to my face but there's definitely more of an AI feel so you can keep adding those layers of AI to it until it has that feel that you want it to have and then you could download of course you have to pay or sign up

for a free trial I think you could sign up for a free trial um but you have to put your card in to sign up for the free trial so that's why I have not done it but you do get that AI feel where you could then add this let me actually screenshot and pasting it right here of course it still has those like Watermark stuff on it so this wouldn't be like an actual hack to use but just so you could get the feel of it so I removed the background image and then of

course it has like that AI look we were kind of going for boom just bring up that brightness a little bit to make it pop and there we are there's our AI fun video now if you love using canva and you're curious how you could use canva to plan out your Instagram feed then I definitely recommend watching this video next where I teach you how you could plan out your Instagram feed using canva alone thank you so much for watching I will see you in the next one follow your joy bye