In this tutorial Shaun Whynacht demonstrates a low‑cost, DIY workflow for creating eye‑catching YouTube thumbnails without a professional photo shoot. He starts by taking a portrait‑mode photo on his iPhone, transfers it to his computer, and uses Canva’s background remover to isolate the subject. He then places the cut‑out onto a pre‑made template, applies his brand colors, adds text (automatically generated via Keep), and inserts a Keep logo to reinforce brand awareness. Shaun explains how to adjust vector elements, keep the dollar‑sign icon aligned, and ensure the final design matches the video’s theme. He emphasizes naming the exported file to match the video title, downloading the PNG, and uploading it directly to YouTube. Practical tips include preferring a blurred background for cleaner cut‑outs, noting a ~95 % success rate, and warning about clothing that blends with the background. Throughout, he mentions affiliate links for Canva and Keep, encourages comments for questions, and ends with a call‑to‑action to like and subscribe.
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You know those YouTube videos that you see where the thumbnails always have a picture of the content creator where they're making a funny face or doing something, and you think to yourself, this is exactly what I need to up my YouTube game, but I don't have the ability to have a photo shoot and get a whole library of those images? Well, I'm here to tell you right now, you don't need to. As long as you have a cell phone and the ability to have a Canva account, which don't give yourself an excuse, everybody has the ability to. It's not that expensive. If you want to get it, check out the link in the description below the video. Show me some love and choose my affiliate link to get it. It's only a couple bucks a month. Anyway, we're not here to sell Canva. I'm here to show you a tactic. So here's one of the templates that I like, and we're going to go ahead and do this. I'm going to delete that lady from this. Now I went and took this photo right here from my phone. I took my phone out, my iPhone, put it on portrait mode, um, just because I like that it blurs the background and everything, but the background doesn't matter. I AirDropped it to my your computer or you can email it to yourself, whatever works for you. But the key is you just need to get that photo in here. And what I wanted to make sure is because I'm going on this side right here, I'm okay if I cut my, my shoulder off in the picture here. Let's bring it in here so you can see it. But I wanted to make sure my elbow was not cut off in the edge. Now here we go. We throw this in here and you say, but Shaun, look at the background. This isn't gonna work. No problem. Don't fret. Chill. Here we go. We're gonna click on the image. We're gonna click edit image. And Canva has this awesome tool called background remover. We're going to click on this and the magic little minions are going to go boom, background no mo'. There we go. So now I can go ahead and just boom, put it in here and I can start to, I can move around the picture. I'm going to move the dollar sign up here, make sure it's perfect. Now because I have brand colors, I'm going to go in here and I'm going to go and choose my brand. I'm going to say, okay, let's make the background this. Now I'm going to say, let me just find my YouTube video over here on another screen of what I called it. How to pitch. Okay, so we're gonna go change this. How to pitch— if I can type. And what I want to do here, multiple offers. And we're gonna move some stuff around. This up a little bit. And because I have brand colors, I want to keep consistent with that. Now, the circle here, it's in the back. So you want to keep that there. It's all one, one element. Way to go. All right, now I'm going to add in some text here with Keep automatically. I'll make this font white so it stands out. I'm gonna bring it down here just like that. Now I might even have the Keep logo, and I do, just to bring a brand awareness. I'm Keep Certified Partner. So again, a little shameless pitch here, if you don't have Keep and you would like to, I will also put the link to that in the comments. So there we go. Um, and let's, let's take, let's fix that dollar sign. Let's make that one. One thing I like about these templates is they're all like, oh, we don't want that. We're going to go white. They're all like vectored images, so you can easily change colors. Boom. All right, so that, I'm okay with that. That's pretty, pretty darn cool. So I'm going to take this and the other key thing is I wanna make sure when you're doing thumbnails that you always name the file to match the video. So I'm gonna go, I'm gonna hit share and we're gonna go download and we're gonna save that. And now I can go ahead and upload that image to my YouTube video, as easy as that. So now you don't need a photo studio to go ahead and get these type of images. The system needs a nice clean edge, that's why I like the blurred background versus something that's sharp. I've always found that it gives a nicer clean cut out of that. There are a couple times where, you know, if you're— what you're wearing is very similar to the background, it doesn't always cut it out very well. But I've had probably about a 95% success rate doing that. So if you got any questions about what you just saw, please leave a comment on the video and I will reply to that comment. If you want to check out Keep, 14-day free trial, or Canva, both those links are in the description. Show us some love, like, subscribe, and we'll see you in the next video.
