Create Eye-Catching YouTube Thumbnails in Keynote (Fast and Free)

## Introduction Hey everybody, it’s Josh from Cap Unpacked. Today I’m going to show you how to make your very own custom thumbnails in Keynote. Now, I know what you’re thinking: Keynote is used for presentations. However, I’ve been making thumbnails for the past five years with Keynote, and many of my videos have actually done really well. So today, I’m going to show you how to make thumbnails using Keynote. Without further ado, let’s get straight into it. ## Thumbnail Example 1: Health-Oriented Food Thumbnail In this video, I’m going to show you how to make a health-oriented thumbnail using some food I took a photo of on holiday, and also a brand-new product I purchased. You can see this brand-new Sonos speaker. A lot of people use Photoshop and other programs to cut the image out of the background, but I’m going to show you how to remove that in literally one click in Keynote. ### Remove the Background (One Click) What you want to do is go to **Format**, click on **Image**, and then hit **Remove Background**. Just like that, the whole background is gone. The whole image is perfectly cut out, which makes our life a whole lot easier when making thumbnails. ### Set Up the Background I’m going to readjust this—just slide it to the side—and I’m going to delete everything else on the slide so it’s literally just the white box and the image of the plate. Instead of changing the color of the background directly, I’m going to add a normal square shape and color-fill that with an advanced gradient. It looks a bit disgusting right now, but I’m simply going to change the gradient. Actually, let’s just go to a gradient fill—that will make our life a lot easier. I’m going to select the first gradient color and set it to green. Then, I’ll set the second gradient color to a darker green. You can see it’s kind of a health-oriented color. Then we’ll use the **Arrange** button in the top right to move this backward and put the food in front of it. It looks absolutely amazing so far. It makes the image pop out, and it makes the background look vibrant. ### Add Depth with Shadows What I like to do in thumbnails is add a bit of depth. I use shadows to make the item look like it’s not flat on the background—like it’s hovering a bit. So I like to turn on shadows, and you can customize them however you like. If you don’t want too much blur or you want less offset, you can adjust that, but I’m just going to leave it as-is for now. ### Add the Title Text Now you want to add your title. I usually click on the text box at the very top of the screen and place it here. It is quite small, but you can simply select it, click on **Text**, and set the size to, let’s say, 250 for now. I think that should be good. I’m just going to come up with a random title: “10 Health-Focused Foods.” That’s kind of related—it’s kind of healthy—so we’ll put that there for now. Obviously, we’re going to change the font because it looks pretty crappy right now. First, I’ll change the color to white, because white looks quite nice on thumbnails and it pops out a lot. Then I’ll change the font to one of my favorites, Bebas Neue. It’s one I use on almost all of my thumbnails. I’ll set the size slightly higher so it stands out more. As you can see already, the thumbnail looks absolutely amazing. ### Optional: More Effects If you want to add a few more fancy features, you could move the plate over the wording to make it look like the plate is on top of the font. I know a lot of people like that depth effect. You can also add shadows to the text to make it pop as well. If you do want that, you can—but I think it kind of wrecks the thumbnail a bit. Well, I guess it makes it look okay. Maybe we’ll leave the shadow on. And there you have it: we’ve made a thumbnail within five minutes, I think, and it’s a pretty good thumbnail. I know you can get a lot better if you use Photoshop, but through Keynote, it’s pretty impressive that you have all these features. ## Thumbnail Example 2: Product Unboxing Thumbnail (Speaker) Let’s move on to the next one. I’m going to make an unboxing-style thumbnail for this speaker. I’m going to use the same theme that I use for my Cap Unpacked channel—the one we’re using right now. ### Remove the Background and Add a Theme First of all, I’m going to remove the background, and you can see it did it straight away. I can’t believe how awesome that feature is. So we’ll put the speaker there, and we’ll add a nice background—an advanced gradient fill. Oh, it’s already got my colors automatically; that’s pretty cool. So we’ll do that. ### Add Text and Branding I like to add white font, which I use on lots of my videos. If I was doing a review, I’d change that up a little bit—maybe make it like 400. That is a really bad photo I took of the speaker. I don’t have any other good photos of this speaker, but you can kind of see where I’m coming from: you can have your font here, your image here, and then what I like to do is add my little logo in the corner, which is also on Keynote. You can see that thumbnail stands out really well. And this green one stands out really well, too. ## Wrap-Up So yeah, I guess that’s how you use Keynote. You can use all the other features too, but I thought I’d just sum it up in a nutshell to make it easier and show you that you can actually make thumbnails through free programs instead of having to pay, like, 79 Australian dollars a month for Photoshop. If you did enjoy the video, don’t forget to leave a like and subscribe, and I can’t wait to see you in the next video. See ya.