Introduction;

Why do edited thumbnails matter?:

It's pretty simple, edited thumbnails matter because they’re the first impression your audience gets along with the viewable description. It's a quick visual hook that decides whether someone clicks or scrolls past. A well edited thumbnail doesn’t just look good, it tells a story, sets the tone, and instantly communicates the style or personality behind the content.

Common Mistakes:

One of the biggest mistakes beginners make in thumbnail design is overcrowded, which is when you try to fit too many elements into a small space. When everything is fighting for attention, nothing stands out, and the viewer’s eye doesn’t know where to look. Low readability is another major issue you'll probably be facing, text that’s too small, overly stylized, or blends into the background can ruin an otherwise good image. Finally, with AI-generated art, uncanny or distorted faces are a common problem, slightly off proportions, weird eyes, or awkward poses can make a thumbnail look odd, though you likely won't use those types of images anyway. You'll be taught how to fix these problems later.

Fundamentals of Thumbnail Design

Focal Points:

Focal points are one of, if not, the most important things in your thumbnail. Focal point/s are the focus of the image, if your image is crowded it may be difficult to differentiate between random people and the main character. Take the following image from one of my bots as an example:

's the focus of the image? The girl of course! Now that's quite obvious, but it's important to try not use images where the main character is difficult to differentiate between random people!

Color Theory:

Ever wondered how certain colors make you feel differently? Maybe pink feels fun and bubbly, blue feels a little sad? Certain colors evoke certain emotions, and you bet they can be important in portraying feelings in your thumbnail. Red is anger, blue sadness, etc. You can look up "Color Theory" and you'll get plenty of results. Just remember not to throw a color everywhere, as this will create "visual fatigue" in the viewer and the image will likely look worse if only one color is used- which let's my segway on to Contrast...

Contrast:

Contrast is another VERY important aspect, contrast is the principle of placing opposing elements side-by-side, such as light and dark. Take a look at this example

I wrote "Abigail" in white text on her right, but the ground is also white- This causes the text to become almost invisible, the correct thing to do here is to change the color to something that stands out from white- Like black!

ys, and I mean ALWAYS make sure people can read your text, no one likes trying to read text that can't even be read!

PHOTOSHOP TUTORIAL:

So you want to know how to use photoshop in order to edit your thumbnails? Well this part of the guide is just for you! I'll be going over and demonstrating everything you'll need to know. Again, there's 17 Chapters, and this is intended to be read one by one, and you will slowly learn more and more as I go on. The beginning chapters teach you useful tricks that get used later on in the guide, so take note of that, the following is some basic info you'll need to know:

The Software You'll Be Using + General Knowledge;

So you probably know that photoshop isn't free, ($27 a month). Not everyone can afford that, so we'll be using a different program for this instead. The name of the website is called "Photopea". It's a website, but it works and that's what matters! You can visit it with this link: https://www.photopea.com

You'll want to setup and account , so click the red "Account" button and create one. Once done you should be at the home page, it looks like this:

From here, click the "File" button, you'll see "New" and "Open" on the dropdown menu. If you want to edit a pre-existing image, click "Open" and choose the image in file explorer. If you want to start fresh, click "New" and choose a template to start with!

This is the main screen, on the left bar you will see all the tools you can use, from top to bottom- here are the names (Note that you can right click on their icons to change what tool you're using!):

The letters here are the hotkeys you can use on your keyboard to instantly select them!:

• (V) "Move Tool" - Lets you move things around.
• (L) "Lasso Tool" - Let's you copy and paste certain things.
• (W) "Magic Wand / Quick Selection" - Let's you quickly select things, much like the lasso tool.
• (C) "Crop" - Crops the image to a different size.
• (I) "Eyedropper" - Selects what color your cursor is hovering over.
• (J) "Spot Healing Brush" - Uses AI to quickly fix an area, can be very useful at times.
• (B) "Brush Tool" - Quite self explanatory, can be paired with the eyedropper to paint using colors you selected.
• (S) "Clone Tool" - Pretty much a worse version of the "Lasso Tool".
• (E) "Background Eraser" - Turns whatever it touches into a PNG.
• G) "Paint Bucket Tool" - Photopea's version of "Fill", quickly turns everything in a certain area into one color.
• (None) "Smudge Tool" - When dragged, it smudges colors together, very useful if you need to blend things together.
• (O) "Dodge / Burn Tool" - Dodge lightens what it touches, while burn darkens, useful if you want to shade.
• (T) "Text Tool" - Quite self explanatory, adds text where you click, can use thousands of different fonts and sizes.
• (P) "Pen Tool" - Adds "Anchor Points", You won't need to use this though!
• (A) "Path Select" - Selects "Paths", You won't need this either!
• (U) "Shape Tool, (Custom, Rectangle, Circle)" - Adds a shape of your choice, click and drag the cursor to change it's shape.
• (H) "Hand Tool" - Allows you to move around the canvas by clicking and dragging. (Not useful unless you don't have a mouse.)
• (None) "Colors" - Allows you to choose the colors you use for your brush. You can click on the arrow to swap between the 2, and click on the colors themselves to change them.
• (None) "Quick Mask Mode" - You won't be using this!
• (None) "Keyboard" - Or this either!

Whew.. That's all of them..

Parts Of The Editor:

During the guide I will describe different parts of the editor, like "Top Bar" or "Layer Panel", below is a diagram of the different parts of the software we'll be using:

Another general thing to note is that you can select layers by clicking "V" on your keyboard and clicking them. Or you can click on it's layer in the Layer Panel.

Basic Controls:

You'll have to know how to move around your canvas if you want to edit effectively. You can use Scrollwheel to move vertically, and hold CTRL + Scrollwheel to move horizontally.

You can click the Eye icon next to your layers to hide them from view if they aren't being used

Lasso Selecting:

The lasso tool allows you to select an object and copy it somewhere else, for example- You can copy a lamppost and paste it somewhere else if you want more, this goes for anything you want doubled. The keybind for the lasso tool is "L", it'll be at this point on your left sidebar:

e that you can right click the lasso icon to change it to different versions, I prefer "Polygonal Lasso Select", so that's what I will be using.

you can see, this girl's left eye in this thumbnail is very messed up. Instead of drawing a new one- It's better to instead copy her right eye and paste it as her left eye, here's how to do it!

When you click, you will start placing lines. What you want to do is place these lines all around the thing you want selected. Each line connects to the last one. And this is how you make a selection. The thing you are selecting will select once you connect back to the start:

In this image I have a few lines done outlining the eye, but I'll have to go all the way around to select it!

So now it's selected, to copy it- hit CTRL + C to copy, and CTRL + V to paste. Now you will have a new layer which is your copied object!

But it's no use just sitting there, we need to put it over her original eye, it should already be selected. But if not, press V and click where the eye is. The copied object will always be right over what you copied, making it invisible unless you click on it.

Now I'm going to click and drag the eye and roughly put it over her distorted eye.

So the eye is facing the wrong way.. But it's an easy fix! As you can see this blue outline with white squares is now surrounding the eye. Go to any of the edges with your cursor and you will see an "Arrow", like this:

Simply click while your cursor is in arrow form, don't drag it. You'll now have a different menu in your top bar which now shows the tilt and size of the copied image, like this:

right click the copied image and you'll get a menu right next your cursor, like this:

To change the direction of the copied image you can click any of those buttons, but we need to click "Flip Horizontally".

Still not perfect... so we need to rotate it, remember the arrow I just told you not to drag? Well now I can drag it until it matches the angle of the messed up eye. Like this!

, that looks better, right? If you want to you can play around in rotating the image around until you get it juuust right. You can also use different types of the lasso tool, like the ordinary one, which just follows your cursor, the "Rectangle" one, which just makes a box, the "Eclipse" one, which makes a circle, and the magnetic one.. which is pretty janky so don't use it.

The Brush Tool

The Brush Tool allows you to paint over things with your brush, you can right click while using the brush tool to change it's size and brush type. The color of your brush can be changed be clicking on either of the 2 colors on your sidebar, this will bring up a menu where you can adjust a slider to alter the color you're using. The top color of the 2 will be the one that is currently being used.

As you can see, this is the initial menu. Clicking and dragging in the box will let you change the color to the hue you hover over. And on the right we have a color spectrum, this color spectrum can be used to further change the colors. So how about I give an example, I'll get a bright pink color, so I'll have to adjust the slider on the right first!

That's quite pink in my opinion, now I'll click and drag in the box until I get the hue of pink I'm looking for.

And from there all you have to do is click "OK" and the color will be selected! This color box is almost always used when choosing a color so it's important to know how it works. But what if you want to pick a color that's already in your image? Well, if you hover your cursor outside of the box, it'll turn into a crosshair. Anything you click on will have it's exact color copied, down to the pixel! Here's a quick demonstration:

As you can see, I clicked outside of the box and clicked on her sleeve, which gave me the same orange to use as a brush! This is useful if there's a defect somewhere that you want to remove- but don't want to scour the color menu for a similar hue.

Using A Selected Character For Different Things

Selecting The Character Of An Image

Selecting the character in your image is used when you want to put things behind them. For example- objects or text. And it's used to give your character an outline. This method is the easiest and uses the Select Subject feature, note that this feature isn't 100% accurate, and may select the wrong thing. If so.. You'll have to use the lasso tool! In this demonstration I'll give the character an outline and put some dynamic text behind her!

First thing you want to do is right click the Layer your character is on, unless you did some editing already- It should always be Layer 1. From here you want to click Duplicate Layer to make a copy of it!

! Now we have "Background", which is the new copy- Now go back and click on Layer 1 in the side menu. Click "W" on your keyboard to open the Quick Select menu.

Now, click Select Subject, this will prompt you to watch an Ad to continue but free has it's own price that you have to pay, so you'll just have to sit through it. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Tada! Now we have our character outlined! But of need to cut it so it's just the character on this layer, so we'll use a Raster Mask for it, make sure your character is selected when adding a Raster Mask!

To turn on a Raster Mask, hit the square with a circle button below where your layers are- in the square box in the image above. Clicking this will cut the character out, so let's do that!

Now the character is cut, you can tell by looking at the layer, it should have a new window with a white silhouette of the character. Pressing the Eye Icon of the other layer will show what's left.

Adding An Outline To Your Character

Adding an outline, know as "Stroke" is a good way to make your character stand out against the background, not to mention it looks good, so let me show you how:

Now that the character is selected, I'll add a white outline to her for. To do so, click the "eff" button on the bottom right below the layer panel, here:

This will bring up the effects menu, from there, click the Stroke button. Make sure to do this with the layer that has the Raster Mask selected, not a different layer!

Here's the Stroke menu! As you can see it says "Size" at the top, this is how wide you want the outline to be, opacity changes how transparent it is, and the red box is how you change the color of it, this brings up the color box I described earlier.

I'll add a white outline, so I'll click the color box and change it to a pastel red, why not white? Because the ground is white, which means you can't really see the white outline And I'll make the outline 9 pixels wide. Here's how it looks!

But her shirt is still messed up, and the stroke is in the wrong place, look at her collar!

Her collar is now pink due to the stroke, remember how the Selected Subject feature didn't cut out the character perfectly? Well I have a way to fix it. All I'll do is cut out that section on the layer below her, this is the original layer, "Background. This one does not have a stroke or has been selected, so it still looks normal. So select the the Background layer and cut out the section, it doesn't have to be perfect by the way!

Here's how it looks, make sure to move it up the layers until you can see it on the outline layer, then merge the copied part with the outline layer!

Writing Text And Placing It Behind Characters

Now we're going to actually write out text out, to start, press "T" on your keyboard to open the text menu, clicking anywhere will add a "Line" as I call it. The Line is the place where your text starts being written it should look like this:

ting now will start producing text, if it doesn't just click on the "Line" or try creating a new text line and deleting the old one. It'll probably be too small, that's when you look to the "Size" box on the top bar, By default it's 24 px (pixels), let's say I want it to be 70 px, just click the box and write in the size you want it to be, simple! The box just to the right of it is the color box, which will let you change the color of your text. It uses the same color box as I showed you earlier, so refer back to that if you forgot how to use a certain part of it.

You can also change the text type with the Format menu, it should almost always be shown as "Regular", as that's the type of text you have selected. It's how you change to Bold, Italic. Remember that not all fonts support different formats, so don't expect those options to be always there!

The image below is a quick diagram of all the text options you have!:

So now you know how to create text, format it, change it's font, change it's color and how to change it's size. Now we can move on to the fun part!

Here we have an image I made of a Leannan Sídhe from Irish folklore. Her name here is "Bríd", but I've decided that I want to put the text slightly behind her head to make it more dynamic. Remember the trick I showed you to selecting a character earlier? We're going to use that here, so I'll skip past the part where I cut her out.

Now that I have the image selected, it's quite easy. Remember to put the text BETWEEN the two duplicate layers, like this:

Once you have that done, when you drag the text over to the character- it'll go behind them!

a! Now it's behind her! (You can click on the any of the other layers in the layer panel to deselect the text.)

Text And How To Edit It In Different Ways

The Reason For Edited Text:

Text is important when it comes to expressing emotion along with your character, remember that text isn't necessary and you don't need to use it in your thumbnail! Though it can be very useful if you add a character's name in a font that describes them best, I've already gone over it so I won't explain it again. Just know that when you're planning on adding a character's name with text, think of the emotion that you're trying to portray. If the character is happy you might add a bubbly- fun font, if they're sad you might use a more serious cursive font, etc. It helps to just look up "(Insert Emotion Here) font", this'll give you many examples that is easier to find than the examples in the Photopea font browsers, speaking of which, let's get to it!

Loading Custom Fonts

Loading a custom font is easy, first you'll need to find the font you want to use first online, I'm thinking of making a sad / angst character, so I'll look up "Sad fonts" in google. The website I like to use is 1001 Fonts, despite their name- they have WAY more than 1000 fonts. So you'll find plenty of examples.

So I took a look, but unfortunately none of the fonts available fit the angst theme I'm going with. So I checked my failsafe website, "Fontspace". And I found a font named "Sad Train" that fits my theme, so I'll be using that. When you download a font it will be downloaded as a .zip file. So let's go to Photopea!

In the Photopea editor, hit T on the keyboard to open the text menu on the top bar, from here click the current font. It's usually "DejaVu Sans", so just click on that.

And here's the font viewer, There are plenty of fonts already available to you in the viewer. And you can use those if you want, but I want to use my custom font, so to do so, I'm going to click the "Load Font" button in the menu to bring up File Explorer. From there, simply add the file you just downloaded using the File Explorer.

When you load it, It should say "(Name of font) Has Been Loaded!" From here, click on the DejaVu Sans / Current font button again to go back into the font viewer. In the "Find" box, search up the name of the font you downloaded.

And there it is! Just click on it, and now your custom font is selected. This font will not always be saved in Photopea, so it's best you keep it saved in a folder on your PC!

Smudging With The Smudge Tool

The smudge tool is very self explanatory, it smudges the the image on the selected layer, this can be used to blend layers together if there's obvious lines from where they get cut off. The selected layer will always smudge onto others, not the other way around. Here's an example of how to use it!

I could easily use the brush tool or the AI repair tool (More on that in a couple of chapters), but instead I'll blend it in, it's as simple as brushing like how you'd use the Brush tool.

And now it's gone! Here's another example that I made:

It may be hard to see, but there's a line on her arm. This is an issue that you get when trying to copy-paste body parts to other areas of the body. This is done when there's an issue with that part, like wrong shading, or distortions. Now- I'm going to blend the mismatched skin tones together as an example:

See? There's no special technique here- you just smudge over and over until it blends!

Cropping

Cropping is useful when you want your character to be closer, the smaller the image, the bigger the character! It can also be combined with rotating to create a "Dutch Angle", a Dutch Angle is simply a tilt to the camera, so everything is slightly on it's side. This makes the picture dynamic and makes it just a little more unique.

To open the crop menu, click "C" on the keyboard, This'll bring up the grid which let's you make the image smaller!

You can click and drag any of the sides to make the grid smaller, it's important to note that you can hold Shift to make it so that when you click and drag, the square is always symmetrical! To finish, click Enter or click the Tick on the top bar to save it.

I'm going to add a slight Dutch Angle to to the image to give it the tilt I want, a trick to note is that you can hold Shift and click the layer at the top of your Layer Panel to select everything at once, which will be important for this next trick!

With everything selected, press V, this will bring up the tilt / size adjust menu. It should look like this, note how everything is selected in the layer panel, and and the blue lines are surrounding the image.

going to tilt it very slightly on it's left. What I'm going to do is click and drag the bottom left corner (It can be any corner). And rotate clockwise, just a little bit.

You can see now that it's on it's side, the white on the left means it's transparent- like a PNG, but I don't want that. So in this case you have 2 options. You can either create new pieces of the image to fill the gaps, (Like add to the bottom of her dress, fill the darkness on the left, etc) or the solution I'll use- Cropping it smaller so it can't be seen. So click the tick to confirm the tilt, and it's back to the cropping tool!

Using the cropping tool the way I demonstrated earlier, I carefully cropped out the white, and I'm now left with the tilted image. (I also accidentally reset the font, but I'll fix that later. Now I just click the tick and viola! A tilted image!

How To Create Shapes

To create a shape press "U", this will allow you to click and drag to create shapes, the shape menu is where the arrow is pointing. Right click it to select the type of shape tool you want to use. The tools are:

Rectangle: Used to make squares and rectangles.

Eclipse: Used to make circles and ovals.

Line: Self explanatory.

Parametric Shape: Used to make a pentagon.

Custom Shape: Used to make a triangle.

All of these benefit from Holding Shift, Holding Shift while clicking and dragging makes the shape symmetrical, just like when we cropped. You can make use of the Fill tab on the top bar to change the color of your shape, which will open the previously mentioned color box. You can use the box to choose a color, or use the crosshair to pick a color from the image itself. (Make sure to pick the color of your shape before making it)

Drop Shadowing Text Boxes And Text

Shapes:

Drop shadow is an effect that can be applied to both text, and text boxes. It involves making a duplicate of the original image, then placing and darkening it to create the illusion of a shadow, here's some examples:

the boxes and text here are drop shadowed, note that you can't drop shadow with the same colors, the difference between the 2 layers should be easy to see, otherwise It might come out jumbled- especially if it's text!

First I'll demonstrate this technique with 2 blue boxes, and then I'll move on to showing you how to do it with text.

First of all, press "U" on your keyboard to bring up the shape menu, as you can see in the image above, on the top bar next to "Fill", I have my first color already picked. This will be the main color of your box.

that the first box is done, press the "Fill" button to change the color to the the contrast color. This will be the color of the box behind the first one, which is what gives it it's "shadow". You can use any colors for this, but it's important that you should be able make out the difference between the 2! Now that the secondary color is selected, make another square the same size. You can use the first square as a stencil as the new one. This box will have the color you've just selected.

Remember that they don't have to be the same size! Just roughly the same size, like what you see in the image above. All you need to do from here is put the 'Darker / 2nd Square' below the first one, and position it similar to what you see below. You can do this for every corner, just customize it as you see fit!

Text:

This process is relatively the same as the shapes I showed you before. But I'm going to demonstrate it anyway.

Start by creating your text and and then copying it via CTRL + C And CTRL + V. And then move the secondary text to the side. Like what you see above. Make sure to put the Secondary text on a lower layer on the first one, it has to be behind it!

.. There is no contrast here at ALL! Time to change the secondary text to a different color! To do so, double click the text itself, if the main text is in the way, just move it.

Once you have your text selected, it'll be highlighted similar to this. See that Fill tool above, yep- We're using it again, use that to change the color of the secondary color, or the crosshair. I'm going to Paint It Black.

You might want to click "V" out of reflex to instantly move the text box, but don't! The text will be highlighted and if you press "V" you'll replace all the text with "V"! Instead, click the arrow and THEN move it. As with the boxes, move it until it's at an angle that creates a shadow effect, try it out!

there's the finished product, I'll admit it isn't the best choice of colors, but here's a better example:

As you can see, this thumbnail uses drop shadowing very effectively, this gives the character's name text more pizazz and depth, which makes it stand out compared to normal fonts! You may also notice that her name is slightly behind her shoulder, that also adds more depth to the thumbnail as well!

Dot Brushing

In the thumbnail I just showed you, you'll notice that the character has dots around her, looks nice right? This uses a custom brush, but I have a link below to the brush download!

Link To Brush Pack: https://filebin.net/4i4py4nl2mgpeyk2

Once downloaded, go into Photopea. I'll be using a different instance of my browser for this as I already have the brushes installed:

Press "B" to open the Brush tool, from there click this arrow on the top bar:

Now you're in the main brush menu, see the arrow on the middle right of the brush menu? Click it!

It'll give you this white menu with different options, you want to click "Load .ABR". Then add the file I gave you, you should now have the "Sam's Brushes" pack!

Now click the arrow on the top bar again. There's many different brushes with special effects, (I recommend trying them all out), but the one we'll be using is this one in the menu!

And there you go! Give it a try along with the rest of your new brushes, you usually use this around the sides of your character to make them look good, here's an example I made to give you an idea:

You don't have to do it ALL around your character like I did, you can also put it in only a few places. Like the 'Jenny' thumbnail I showed you earlier!

AI Repair Tool

This is by far one of the most useful tools, this is a special brush that uses AI to fix defects, the AI is quite smart and great at removing things quickly and repairing things that would take a long time to do! You can click "J" on your keyboard to open it, and Right Click to change it's size. It works just like the brushes, you click and drag and the AI will see what there is and try and fix it. It can also blend very well. Your editor will pause for a second when the AI is thinking, the bigger the area it has to fix, the longer it has to think, so remember that. Here's an example:

On no! This image was generated with defects, and they definitely were NOT added in post as an example! I'll use the AI repair tool and see if it knows what to do.!

As you can see, the AI fixed it perfectly! I recommend that you don't drag the tool over areas that don't need to fix, it will probably cause distortions as the AI will get confused and try fix the wrong spot.

Changing Colors To Different Ones

You have a blue sweater but you want it red? Well I have you covered, as there's a way to do that! You'll be using the "Hue / Saturation" tool.

Here we have a picture of a dog-girl, I think I want her eyes to a gold-yellow color. Here's how I'll do it!:

First things first, you'll want to use the Lasso Tool to copy her eyes one at a time until you're left with 2 layers, one for each eye.

If you're only editing 1 layer, you can skip this next step:

If you have 2 layers, hold CTRL and left click both the the layers, right click any of them and click "Merge Layers"

Now that you have your layer, click the half colored circle below the layer panel, this one:

s will bring up the Adjustment Layer menu, in the menu, click the "Hue / Saturation" button to create a hue changing layer.

Now this menu will pop up, in it you can adjust the Hue, Saturation, and Lightness of your selected layer.

Hue Will change the color hue of your image, cycling through the color spectrum..

Saturation Will make the image more vibrant or less colorful depending on how you adjust it.

And Lightness will make the image brighter or darker depending on how you adjust it.

So you should play with the hue slider first until you the the rough color you want, and then use Saturation and Lightness to adjust it to the right color. So now I'll adjust the sliders until I get the yellow / gold color I've been looking for!

That's a pretty good yellow color, though I think the problem here is quite obvious- Everything is blue! But the solution is quite simple, remember the layer I told you to cut of the object you wanted to change the color of? Well select the adjustment layer and the the cut layer and Merge them- like this:

Tada! It's that simple. Her eyes are now yellow! You can use this method with quite literally anything you want.

Adding Object To An Image / Creating transparent images

I'm sure you've heard of PNGs before, right? A transparent image that can be seamlessly added into an existing one. In this image I want the character to have a thought bubble with a heart in it- to show her affection. So I'll first have to find an image I can use:

we have plenty of examples of 'PNGs', see how I said both "PNG" and "Transparent" in my search? That's because there's plenty of fakers that pretend to be PNGs that are usually useless- I'll talk about how to combat them in a second. But first let's lead with the example of an actual PNG.

This is the only one I could find! See how scare real PNGs are? Either way, I'll paste it in! Just copy and paste the image of your choice and it'll be transparent, like this:

you can edit and adjust to make it work in your image.. but what if your image was not a real PNG?

Creating a PNG

you can see, this is a fake. It's not transparent at all. But there's a way around it!

I'll be using the Quick Select tool, you can click "W" to instantly use it.

It's important to note the Quick Select is very hit or miss, It either works or it doesn't. If it doesn't work, you'll just have to use the Lasso Tool.

What I'll do is select the main bubble, then press CTRL + X to cut it, then CTRL + V to paste, then I will repeat that for the other 2 small bubbles. Remember to always select the correct layer when cutting it!

I'm left with 3 layers, one is the leftovers from what I cut out, like a bread crust. While the other 3 are the ones I'll be using, I'm going to now combing the other 3 into one using Merge Layers to make it one layer!

Just like that, all the layers have been combined into one to make a PNG, and I deleted the crust because it's not needed.

Removing Colors To Create a PNG / Removing Colors From An Image

I'm the object you're trying to cut out has a white background, It's possible to cut out the white background and make a PNG, here's how!

Here I have a scythe I want to use, but it has a white background to it, cutting it out with a lasso tool is boring, not to mention impossible depending on how complicated the item is. So I'll be using the Blending Options method.

Simply right click on the layer you want to remove the background of and click Blending Options

Here's the menu, we'll be using those sliders with the black to white gradient. Because the background is white, we need to adjust the white gradient on the top slider until the background is gone.

It's that simple! Be careful when using the slider however, as you may start to remove parts you don't want affected. This is what happens when I move the slider just a little too much:

Removing A Color

Here we have a pair of glasses, thankfully this was a real PNG. However I don't like the red accents on it, so I'm going to remove it.

Follow the same steps as earlier and open up the Blending Options menu, but I won't be editing with the color white this time, instead click the dropdown next to "Blend If" where it says "Gray", right here:

Now I'll change it from Gray to Red and adjust the the slider just like I did before:

? No more red! You can use this trick to remove Red, Green, Blue, And Gray (White) colors from your image, give it a try!

Blurring Everything But Your Character

Blurring the background creates a lack of detail, which makes your character stand out in comparison. This is a trick I don't see very often and I personally think it looks amazing! So I'll demonstrate it here;

Remember Chapter 5? Selecting characters? We'll be using that method again, but this time to blur the background, I'll have a selected character and a background here. So you can refer back to 5-A for that if you need to! I'll be using the same setup from that demonstration anyway.

Firstly, make sure you have the Background layer selected, the one WITHOUT the Raster Mask (The black and white image next to your layer is a Raster Mask). Now on the Top Bar, click "Filter", then "Blur", then "Gaussian Blur". Like this:

Now we're in the blur menu, the "Radius" slider adjusts the intensity of the blur, the farther to the right, the more intense!

Adding Glow

Glow can be used to make things look like they're emanating light when done correctly, this is really useful when you want to make things like fire or streetlights feel real and not just a prop in your thumbnail, here I'll be demonstrating with a fire torch!

So here's the torch, But it doesn't really look real without the glow of the fire, so I'll have to add it in in post, here's how:

First, find what area of the object is making light- you might be tempted to copy the whole thing to add a glow to it, but does the handle really glow? Of course not! In this case with a PNG, the fire is of course creating light, so I will only copy that.

Now I have the fire itself cut out as a separate layer, (Remember, use CTRL + C + CTRL + V to copy when you have a lasso selected) Later I will make sure put it behind the original PNG so I can still see the Outline it creates when I make it glow.

Now, with the fire / glowing object selected, click eff, just below the layer panel, then "Color Overlay" - Like this!

Once in the menu, click on the color box, (It's usually white or black)- Your menus should now look like this:

g the box, you can change the color of your glow, or of course you can use the crosshair to copy a color from the image itself.

Once you have the color, press "OK" on both boxes and move the colored layer below the original one, as shown here:

We're almost done adding the glow! From here, with the glow layer selected, I'm going to click "Filter" (On the top bar), then "Blur", Then "Gaussian Blur". This is the same as when I demonstrated how to make blue previously. Then amplify the blur to the intensity you think is right!

Tada! The torch is now glowing! Remember that you can do this with any form of light, not just fire! Streetlights, Lamps, LEDs, etc!

END OF GUIDE + Afterword From Writer

Well, You've made it to the end! I hope that this guide will has taught you some valuable tricks when it comes to editing! I made this guide after I saw just how little people on Janitor edit their thumbnails, personally, seeing this grinds my gears. People should be more creative when It comes to their thumbnails, even if it was AI generated- you can still have fun editing it, and give it more personality it wouldn't have had otherwise!

Updated on: 22/01/2026