Composition Analysis

Emotion Expression

Color Strategy

Text Strategy

The Hybrid Workflow Rule

Garbage In, Garbage Out

Thumbnail Photography Fundamentals

The Power of Physical Props

Prompt Like an Art Director

This is one of 10 thumbnail tools. I'm going to walk you through a workshop of how to do this for yourself. If you want to get one of 10, you can go ahead and do that using my link. You could also use code Roberto at checkout. They'll give you 20% off. So, 20% off at checkout. But this tool is going to hit a little different for you because I'm going to be using it in a way that most of you are not, cuz most people using these AI tools are doing them wrong and wondering why they're not getting good results.

The way that I'm using this tool is that I actually imported, and a lot of you know this about me. A lot of you know that I have taken a bunch of quality headshots. You can do this if you just have a clean white wall. I have a white backdrop in my studio in my basement. I also have a black backdrop. You guys also know I have a green screen. So, I use those and I take advantage of those. But if you have a clean background and if you utilize props, you guys know I'm a big fan of using props. So, if you use posing props and photography and then you use the one of 10 AI thumbnail generator, if you're using props, physical props, see it's not digital, it's real. And you use proper posing techniques, facial expressions, all of those things, and you do good photography with good lighting. You know, I'm a stickler for good lighting, then you will be able on your own to craft better YouTube thumbnails. And so, I wanted to show you this. So, using the one of 10 tool, what I did was I uploaded real photos and it gives me really good results.

I'll give you a primary example. We'll switch to the creator gear guide channel, which is supposed to be a photography channel that I'll eventually revive. And then what we'll do here is we'll actually feed it; we're going to feed it some of my favorite Sony G Master lenses. So, we selected those. We're going to select a camera body and then another camera lens. We're going to hit done. Then we're going to select a photo of me that we're going to use. We'll just select this one. This is a handsome photo of me, if I do say so myself, that has me holding the camera. And we're going to the best lenses for studio photography in 2026. And we're going to have it generate some thumbnails for us. And you're going to get to see what it makes. Now, while it's doing that, which will not take long, in fact, how long is it taking? You can see it's actually going pretty quickly.

So, while it's doing that, I don't mind answering questions in the chat that you guys have about this because my goal here is to show you a process where you can generate thumbnails or a very close approximation of them very quickly.

Because I'm a skilled graphic designer. I can do a lot of what these AI tools are doing, but I cannot do it fast and I can't do multiple iterations of it fast. This would take me by hand dozens of minutes, possibly an hour, hour and a half to be able to make multiple thumbnails. Even with my skills, my photography, my templates to get to the same results take me a half hour to 90 minutes per thumbnail. And that's because I know what I'm doing and that's to get very good quality thumbnails. And then I'd still have to do more work after that for A/B testing. For a lot of you, if you use this instead of spending 90 minutes to get a result, and that's if you had my skill, if you are not a professionally trained graphic designer, it's going to be much much more difficult for you. And after 90 minutes, you may not get something you're satisfied with. But here's the thing. This is going to do in about 90 seconds what a skilled graphic designer can do in 90 minutes. I mean, and it's wild and it's one of those things you have to see it with your own eyes to actually believe it.

But I'm going to remind you the trick to this is that I inputed my own photography, which is really good for a lot of you. You need to be taking better photography. What I recommend is that you get a friend or a family member for those of you who don't have professional camera gear, but if you have a real YouTube camera, if you have one of these real YouTube cameras like what I use, even if it's a Sony a6600 or 6100 or a Sony ZV10, if you have a real camera, I recommend you have a friend or a family member, even if they're not professional photographer, take some headshots of you that you can use for your thumbnails. In different poses with different facial expressions and so on and so forth. If you don't have a real camera with your phone, instead of you just taking selfies, have somebody take closeup and wide shots of you against a clean wall, clean white wall, you know, nothing in the wild, and just do different poses and different facial expressions. If possible, use physical props as well. And then put those and load them up into one of 10.

Then the other thing that you're going to want to do is you're going to want to. Oh, I ran into a little error, but that's on me. I think I might just have to refresh it. What you want to do is you also, if you're a product reviewer or even if there's a specific pattern or background or something else you want to use or an asset that you have, upload those to one of 10 as well. In my case, I own real Sony camera lenses. I got the actual product shots of all my Sony lenses, couple of my Sony cameras, and I upload them to one of 10. So, when I want to get shots that involve those, it doesn't have to do generative much of anything for the actual physical photo of me or the camera lenses. It can just recontextualize them. It can pose me a little differently or change the expression. And so, it works out really well overall.

And I can show you some of. I think this one's almost done, but in the meantime, I could also probably just show you some of the other ones it's generated in the meantime because again, a lot of these actually came out pretty good. So, if I were to show you some of these, you would actually think that it's very similar to something I would make. So, the thing is I can literally make this. It's just that it would take me about roughly 45 minutes to make this. One of 10 generated it in about 60 seconds, but it was using the photo assets I gave it plus my real photography.

Soul Solless Barbara says, 'So you create a database of assets then prompted to create. What about adding the text? ' Yeah, it does the text. Based on what I prompt. And I could also have it edit and change the text if I wanted to as well in the prompting, which I'll show you here in a bit that I can change this. So, if I go here and I go edit with AI, I can go change the text to say. Hang on. I'm going to tell it to. I accidentally hit something too soon there. So, prompt I'm going to tell it to change the text to street photography instead of street kings. And then it's going to change that because by the way, it's done this before for me where all it changed was the text. And I can literally get it to where all it will do is just change the text. So in this case, it changes the. I did this earlier and I got it to change the text without changing much of anything else. Because you can literally just give it the prompt oh and change nothing else when you ask it to do something.

I'm going to see if giving it one less camera lens here will fix this problem or whether I have to refresh it. But yeah, so it was able to do that for example. This one I don't love it. I like the pose, but I don't like the text or the background image at all. Make something that shows more of the YouTube interface and uses less text. And so it's probably just gonna reroll this one for the most part, assuming that I'm not having like a browser issue or anything like that. So it's basically going to reroll this one. And again, that could take up to a minute or so. All right. So watch this. I asked it basically for a completely different image. And look at that. It gave me something completely different here. I'm going to ask it. This is close, but I want a more generic YouTube homepage without channel art.

I also would like some graphics as well that demonstrate auditing a channel. So, it's going to do some things there and it's basically going to reroll. But you see how quickly this just gets me to a better result. And again, it maintains this like photo there with this great photo with this prop and this pose that I use that's very thoughtful. I could even change the composition. Like I could tell it to put me on the left instead of the right if I really wanted to.

Yeah. So, this is actually a lot better. I like this direction, but I want a black and white and red theme for it that matches more of the YouTube aesthetic and also make it a bit more futuristic. It's rerolling that. But on my other generation, it rolled an error. But that's probably because that's what I get for trying to do two things at once, probably. Also, this is. I should have made a. Actually I'm gonna tell it this. Let's do that again, but let's leave the photo of me the same. Eliminate the channel audit text from the top. That'll get me closer to what I want. Again, sometimes you have to specify and tell it to leave things alone that you want don't want changed and just make sure it changes the thing that you want. So, we'll give it a minute there to reroll. But as you can see, it doesn't take long for this to come up with some pretty good stuff.

So yeah, that's actually not bad in terms of a design. Again, I just don't fully know how I feel about this one as a concept, but at least it would give me an option. As you can see here, I evolved this one from where it started to here all the way to here where I had it do a little bit of facial retouching because I just felt like my eyes weren't bright enough and I think this pops more.

Again, we'll probably literally use this one for the Friday channel reviews. And I'm going to refresh here. For this one, it had a little bit of trouble with my face, and I think that was just an error. So, we're going to reroll that one. And I think if I'm being completely honest, I think that even though my photography here was really good, um, I just think that there's just some times where depending on how you look, it could be a little off with facial features. I'm actually going to try one that's product only, and I want to show you guys one that's product only. So, we're going to just pick these Sony lenses. And I'm going to show you one that even actually doesn't rely on my um facial features or anything like that. Um, best Sony camera lenses for portrait photography in 2026. So hopefully it rolls a little better with that one. But it can again use your face and it can do it really well because you see it's actually done it for me uh several times here. So, it's actually working pretty well for that. Um, again, sometimes it just depends and it'll go a little far depending on just how you look in terms of the facial accuracy sometimes. But the other good news is I could prompt it to literally remove me. And then if the only issue is how I look and I like the layout, I could just have it remove me, give me that, and then I could go into Canva, Photoshop, Adobe Express, and then add myself into it.

Boom.

So, look at the portrait, the ultimate portrait kit. That one's really good. Portrait Kings best like this. These are actually pretty good. These are actually perfect for the aesthetic of creator gear guide. If I'm being honest, I probably could use three out of the four of these just as is. So, for if you guys if any of you do product stuff or if you're doing things that uh don't require your face and you just had product images. And again, you can see how accurate it is because it has the uh the G icon from the Sony G Master lens, but that's also because again, I put accurate product photos in here. I mean, would you guys believe how well this does? Um, you're asking can I give it brand guidelines? Actually I have done that before with um some more prompting here where I gave it um some prompting around wanting um you know um some of this green color here.

Um, what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna tell it, um, I like the green glow on my faux portrait, but I don't want it as pronounced in the background. I want the background to contrast it with more of a yellow glow within the shelves if anything. And I want the text block up to the be flushed left. Leave the photo otherwise unchanged. So, I can give it brand guidance and I can give it art direction and get these things out of it. And again, I can also literally tell it to change things with the text as you're about to see. And again, when your ingredients are good, when you use good photography, and also when you input your channel, it has previous things you've done with your channel as another reference guide, then it tends to work out fairly well. So, as you can see, it took um the direction fairly well here.

Uh I am going to ask it though make the text flush left but keep it on the right side. Oops. So we'll see if it um accommodates that because I don't want it uh flush center for the text. Um, yeah, I could probably tell it what uh fonts to use to be honest with you. Uh, it's struggling with the text placement here. We are going to try something else though. Can you change the text to the to use the popins font face? Otherwise, leave the rest the rest unchanged. So again, you got to work with a little bit. We're going to see if it can change the text to the Poppins font. If I told it to something more like, oh, change this to a decorative or a handwritten font or marker felt, it would probably work um fine. But again, this for a lot of you will be much easier than messing around in Photoshop or Canva on your own. But if you also wanted to at least see, okay, what does a good um you know uh image look like and then you wanted to recreate it in uh Canva or what have you, then you could. So, you'd want to be able to change those things. This one actually came out pretty good just by itself.

So, as you can see, like one of 10 can generate pretty good overall thumbnails as long as you feed it good assets and decent prompts. And like I said, it can even do it like I did here with um just doing uh gear stuff. Uh, if we change over to doing something for the Roberto Blake channel and then we use a photo of me. Let's use a photo of me here with the YouTube play button. Yep. And we'll basically just use that. And then we'll um uh do how to grow a YouTube channel from zero subscribers in 2026 and we'll see what it comes up with for that. But again, um if you literally start with the foundation like I told you of good photography, this is going to go a long way.

So, what I recommend to a lot of you is if you're going to use uh the one of 10 thumbnail generator, best thing to do is to use it, right? One, connect it to your channel. It'll use your existing channel for some of its references, but then go in and do what I did and upload photography of yourself, well shot, well lit for your photography. I'm also going to recommend that you guys manually adjust the settings for posing for your photography. Um, I think you guys should shoot at f1, uh, sorry, f4. Shoot at f4 or even f8 for your photography that you use for your YouTube thumbnails. Here's why. By shooting at f4 or f8 and just using really, really bright lights, what's going to happen is you're going to get these perfectly tack sharp images where everything about you is in focus. You also want to shoot against a clean wall, but you want to shoot against a clean wall and not be right up against the wall. When you guys are shooting your uh thumbnails and your head shots and everything like that, a lot of you, you're way too close to the wall. If you have more than one light, put a light behind you so that it can eliminate some of the shadows so you don't have to worry about that or get rid of that or have that affecting uh the shot, especially if you're wearing dark clothing. Um, even in your videos, sometimes it helps to have back lighting or an accent light to separate you from the background a little bit more, especially if you're wearing darker clothing like I tend to do. So, you want to make sure you have good lighting. I recommend also trying to get as much of the shot right in the camera for your thumbnails. So again, try to do some posing.

Try to get some good lighting, even lighting if you can. Make sure you have some type of um diffuser on the light. Don't just blast light at yourself. Think about things like reflections. A lot of times I try to angle the lights and my head so that there's less glare reflection from my glasses. Even in some of the shots, you can see I try to minimize the glare on my glasses. You'll want to have to try to edit that out in post even if you are using AI. So, you want to avoid that. And I would recommend most of you don't shoot your YouTube thumbnails against a green screen. Green screen video is one thing for photography. It's a bad idea most of the time. Just try to get a clean wall, a white wall if you can manage it. Get a clean white or gray wall to shoot against. Do that. Don't stand too close to the wall.

Maybe be a foot away from the wall if possible. You can be a foot away from the wall. That's probably for the best. So, you want to do that. Then I would say, like I said, shoot at f8 or f4. Then for shutter speed, if you're going to use manual shutter speed, whether you're using a phone or you're using a real camera, for the shutter speed, I recommend most of you use a shutter speed of one over 250 or one over 500. It'll help with uh the camera shake um and shutter when you push it down, especially if you have a friend or family member shooting for you um and they don't know what they're doing. If you just dial in a lot of these settings, um it'll work. Try to get the ISO low. So, you want to use bright lights to get the ISO low. This is true whether you're shooting on your phone or a camera for uh the shots that you're going to use for building your YouTube thumbnails. And so, you want to do that and you want to do uh some posing. So, those are things you're going to want to do um frankly to try to make all of this work.

Now, you can technically, and again, um it depends on what you want this to all uh look like, per se, but you could technically do a sketch of what you want your thumbnail to look like, and then you could also prompt instructions. But I would caution you that you could do that, but I would also caution you to probably try to use real photography assets as well. And if you combine those, then the results will tend to be better and more of what you like. Um, if you need to change the pose of the person or kind of do a body double. And this will get you uh closer. And this is how big YouTubers are doing it. Because as you've seen from me showing you guys uh what one of 10 can do, it all makes sense how these big YouTubers are getting their thumbnails. And again, I'll answer any of your questions in the chat. I do not mind. Uh we got plenty of people in the uh chat tonight um across our all of our platforms. It looks like there's 103 of you watching across all platforms. So uh that's pretty cool. Um but yeah, if you have questions about this process, if you have questions about the one of 10 tool, if you have questions about thumbnail design in general, you can leave them in the comments and I will try and uh get to as many of them as I can. But yeah, um I do make almost all of my assets myself from scratch. However, there are times where I'm behind on a video because I'm behind on a thumbnail.

This would be a faster process to get to it. And in fact, there are a couple of thumbnails from something like this that.

I would absolutely 100% not hesitate to use. You saw how good a lot of them came out. So, let's see. Uh, Home Rapid Repair in the chat says, "Question. If I use a touch of AI to make small B-roll shots, should I tick the AI box in the video description? " Uh, in a from a disclosure standpoint, sure. But honestly, in my opinion, if it's less than 10% of the video, I really don't think it's worth bothering with. Um, especially if it's something that most people would not notice. But if you want to be a stickler in terms of just disclosure or you feel like your audience will feel some kind of way if you aren't going to be a stickler about the disclosure, then you can go that route. But I think it really what YouTube means when it tells you to disclose that is if you were doing something that where it would matter genuinely matter if um where it would genuinely matter to know if something was real or not. If you're just using it for incidental B-roll and it represents less than 10% of the overall video. Personally, I don't really think it matters. But if you just wanted to say, "Well, if I use it at all, maybe I should check that box. " You can. But at the same time, a lot of the audience is just so aggressively and ideologically anti- AI that they'll just assume that most of your video is AI instead of 5 seconds out of a 20 minute video.

Question. Does it have or have you used the feature to suggest a thumbnail from the title hook of a video? Actually, all of the thumbnails are from me doing exactly that when I'm prompting it. So, when I am when I'm typing um these things, that's literally using the title or the hook of the video to dictate the thumbnail in addition to me using um an asset from the photography. Now, technically, if you had graphical assets, you could use those as well, depending on your style of video. Um, but yeah, that's what I'm doing and I'm doing exactly what you're asking here. So, good question, Miami Cloud.

Doug is exactly correct. So, if your stuff they really when they say the AI disclosure, they're talking about deep fake content. They're talking about AI voiceovers. They're really talking about that stuff where there's an expect expectation of realism or a human being. If you are literally doing this guys for like 5 seconds of B-roll where you just need to show somebody using a hammer, that's not really what that box is for. So, I wouldn't worry about it. It's the same thing like when people ask, hey, if I got a free product, do I need to check that this is a sponsored video? And the answer is like you didn't sign a contract. You didn't get paid money. You got sent a free product. It's like so you don't really need to check the sponsored box. So again, a lot of people, but again, some people feel some kind of way, but a lot of people um from my point of view just take it um a little too far.

So, here's what um it generated for the um prompt here on how to grow a YouTube channel from zero subscribers. Um I think some of these are actually pretty good. I just think that the bottom two, for the bottom two, the design is good, the photo is not. So, what I would do in that situation is Um, edit with AI. So, what I'm going to do here is I'm going to say everything about everything here is perfect. side from the photo of me. Please remove the photo of me and leave the rest of me and YouTube award be specific and leave the rest of the layout intact. Hopefully, it'll take that guidance because the thing is if I do that, I can just swap myself out for uh for this in Photoshop. Now, technically, I could just take this in Photoshop, use the quick selection tool around this, and then um ask it to do a removal, and then I could just put myself in its place. I could do it that way. My hope is that this gets me pretty bloody close. And look at that. So, now I could just take this And I can go into Photoshop and I can add the perfect photo of myself to this just like that and have it. Now, for those of you who don't use Photoshop, you could obviously do the same thing in Canva and you would get that result. You could even ask it to remove the arrow.

Then once you have it, you could put all that back in. So yeah. So I mean, so I think this is like a really good example of how even if it doesn't get something perfect, but it gets everything else perfect. You can literally prompt it with the edit thumbnail tool, which is, by the way, it's still in beta. So this could only get better. This can only get better in terms of the 110 tool. Yeah. So again, uh we've got a link to that in description. The mods are also linking in the chat.

So, uh, Miami Cloud's question followup. How does the AI thumbnails perform compared to thumbnails generated the oldfashioned way back in my day? Back in my day. So, here's the reason I brought up this tool and why we're doing the presentation and demo of it tonight. We're doing the workshop tonight. Most of y'all are not really good at YouTube thumbnails. Whenever I do channel reviews, one of the things we keep running into is that you guys are making one out of five thumbnails by hand the oldfashioned way. You're making two out of five thumbnails the oldfashioned way. The one of 10 tool gives you a way to get multiple thumbnails that are going to be a five out of five or a four out of five every single time or are going to get you so good that all you would have to do is drop a decent photo in and the otherwise the thumbnail is done. So that is why I'm demonstrating this tool for you guys because most of you your content is actually good. your content is fine, but the thumbnails are so bad that it's not you're not getting the views your content actually deserves. So, a lot of you, you're not getting the views your content actually deserves because the thumbnail is bad. Now, you could test an AB test. You could, if you guys are wondering about or you're worried about it, you can make a thumbnail the oldfashioned way. Then, you can make one with one of 10 AB test them.

Do that for five or 10 videos. See what happens. See what people prefer. But if they don't click, they don't watch. And a thumbnail is make or break. And a lot of you, you just don't have the time or skill to become um a graphic designer. So, uh again, if any of you had to make one of these thumbnails, you'd also be spending like an hour trying to make something and still coming up short. Even as simple as this is, most of you would not be able to get to this result in an hour if you tried. Um, like for example, I'm going to show you one of the thumbnails it came up with. Um, so let's look at this one. As simple as this is, as simple as a thumbnail as this is, most of you wouldn't get to this in an hour. As simple as this is, a lot of you struggle with the layouts of where to put text in your thumbnails. Most of you would not be able to get to this result.

So, I know a lot of people there are people turned off by AI, but I think it's been proven that most viewers on YouTube are not turned off by AI. Again, this result, as simple as this is, I could probably do this in 15 to 20 minutes. Most of you probably couldn't um, you know, get there in an hour. And that's an hour that you could have been editing a video and making a higher quality video. So again, I know that there's some people are like, "Well, I want to make everything human by hand or whatever. " But for a lot of you, you can't make a thumbnail as good as some of these. If you spent an hour or two hours doing it, you just wouldn't get the same result. And that two hours could have been spent filming more content. That two hours could have been spent writing a better script, writing better hooks. That two hour could have been spent doing research. That could have been spent doing a higher quality edit. Why spend more time at the thing you're bad at just so you can brag on saying, "Well, a human being did it. " A human being presenting a two out of 10 or a one out, sorry, not a two out of 10. a human being presenting a two out of five or a one out of five result when an AI can do a three, four or five out of five and do it in a tenth of the time. It's not meaningful that oh a human being did it.

If we were talking about you doing illustration and trying to genuinely make art, I could understand that. But a YouTube thumbnail is not art. It's not an art portfolio. It's not part of an art project. It's not part of an art gallery. A YouTube thumbnail has one job and one job only. Can I get people to click on a video? And if you do it just right, again, a lot of people will not even know this is AI. I mean, for the most part, if this had gotten my face perfect, you guys wouldn't know the difference between this and a thumbnail that I made myself because it's that close. Um, if if it came down to it, if it came down to it, most of you for this one for sure. This one. Um, not that one. For most of you, if you didn't know that one of 10 made this, you would literally just assume that this is a YouTube thumbnail that I made. You would just assume that this is a YouTube thumbnail that I made. It's that good.

Um, we have um note here from a fellow graphic designer. Um, so Tavo says, "I'm a graphic designer with that experience. not able to create 10 options, only two or three, and keep going with the next video. Yeah, exactly. So, just this speed and variety and being able to test thumbnails, AB test thumbnails, get a higher click-through rate, that's better. And saving the time, saving the time and having the multiple options, and then being able to go back and spend more time on your video editing, spend more time on doing sound design, spend more time on the retention part of the video. If you can get the click now, you can spend more time on the retention. But a lot of you are struggling just to even get people to click on your videos. And this is your answer.

The artist haven says, "Uh, this would be good for artists or creatives that ".

Don't have their end product in hand before the video is recorded. At least you'll have a plan that you can edit afterward. Yeah, of course you can always edit or change things afterward. And again, sometimes this is good for layout. Sometimes just, oh, this is what something should look like. For a lot of you, you could use this if you still wanted to craft things by hand. You could at least know, okay, I know what it's supposed to look like. I'll do the mechanical myself. Uh, but at least you would have um the layout correct.

Uh, Miami Cloud says, 'Hey, Roberto, thanks for the detailed and real take on this. ' Yeah, absolutely. Again, I I I just want more of you to succeed with your content and you could do this better if you understood how to do it properly and that it's not about AI versus human. It's about both of them.

The thing that I can do better than this obviously is my own photography, my graphical assets, and it is picking up and learning from what the style has been successfully on my best videos. And it's um taking that into consideration plus my prompting. So it is the human and the AI working together because I cannot be as fast as the AI nor can I produce the variety as quickly. So it has two things on me if nothing else. It has speed and it has scale. And no matter how hard I work, no matter how talented I am, I can never match the speed and I can never match the scale. That's what AI does well. However, when it comes to taste and things that look good and some of the base things, it is better at those things because it has my assets to work with. So, it has my original assets that I made by doing my photography, doing my posing and using my physical props and products and doing my product shots, those elements, those assets. I did that and then I'm giving the direction um as the art director and doing the prompting.

Neither of us could get the best result possible on our own. I could do one result and it could take me an hour and it'll be really good. It may be as good or better than the AI. The AI can get a bunch of stuff fast, but can it be as good as me? When we work together instead of against each other, we get a result that's really good and we get a lot of them and we get them faster. And that's where people need to stop fighting with AI and need to learn that a hybrid solution is really the answer. Um, so by using a hybrid solution, we can just get to a better result.

How can I create a thumbnail for my videos after posting? Well, the thing is you can always change your thumbnails in YouTube even after you've posted. And you get to AB test your thumbnails even after you posted. If you go into YouTube and you go into the YouTube dashboard, this is going to be more so on desktop. So, if you've only ever been doing YouTube from your phone, you may not be aware of some of these options.

Most of you need to start using the YouTube desktop more for the dashboard because then you can be a power user because uh the phone cuts like 80% of the features that YouTube actually has. So a lot of you are just too used to posting from your phone. But the desktop more powerful. So, mobile first or mobile only YouTubers that use their phone for everything. They're only getting 80% of the uh features that YouTube has or sorry, they're getting less than 80% of the features YouTube has. Yeah, if you're struggling with views, I think this would help the majority of you. The majority of you struggling with views, this would absolutely help you because you could make uh thumbnails faster and you could make a variety of them and you could do them very quickly.

Um, and again, some of them can be even more advanced. I mean, this one, this one is pretty good. And I could still manually kind of do this. I would have to do the pose, but again, if I wanted to and I wanted to do the posing myself. I could get to this result, but oh my god, would it take me much longer than this did um to get there. So, what I'm better off doing is using AI for something like this because it gets me there. There's only minor tweaks I would have wanted to do on that if I'm being honest. Again, this one is not bad. There are minor tweaks I would do to this, but this is actually really good and it's a different style. Um, and so it could be it could te it might AB test better. For all I know, this one's actually pretty good. There are some changes I would make here.

Um, I I could literally tell it. Um, let's see. I could tell it change the topmost YouTube thumbnail. Oh, sorry. YouTube play button icon to be white instead like the leftmost one is change nothing else and let's see how close that gets us. So again, I I'm giving it the kind of direction that I would have to give to a freelancer. Um, you know, especially someone overseas. I think you should treat all AI tools like they're an overseas freelancer. Uh, where you have to use precise language and be very clear and telling exactly what you want in in detail. And that's how I think we should use AI when we're directing it. If I'm being honest, u I think everyone's problem is they keep using the AI like it's a Google search box. I think you should use it like you're, you know, actually giving somebody instructions and knowing that there may be a language barrier. If you go from that premise, I think it makes more sense because then, uh, if you were talking to someone where there's a language barrier, um, you'd have to use incredibly precise language. And yeah, the the revisions are pretty quick. Um, usually again, they take around one to two minutes at most.

Some of them move a little faster than others.

U, I think some of this is frankly hampered by the fact that I'm live streaming at the same time and the fact that I'm using Firefox instead of Chrome. This all works so much better with Chrome. Uh, but I'm a Firefox guy. Um, and it's for like, you know, privacy reasons and memory leak reasons and stuff like that. Um, it doesn't help that I have like 30 tabs open either if I'm being honest. So, I'm sure that's no small issue that I have 30 tabs open. One of them's chat GBT. That's probably not helping anything. So, like what if I close the overwhelming majority of these tabs? That's probably for the best. Wonder if it froze. But again, it could literally just be all these bloody tabs I have open. I'm still closing tabs as we speak. I'm not joking. That's how bad it is.

I'm like really bad when it comes to having a million and one tabs open all at once. Let me just refresh this come back to it.

But as I said, oh, I have another example for you. So, something I did was I fed it um I fed it uh one of my own design layouts and it came back with a unique take on it. And this was actually really good to the point to where if I eliminate um the text and this uh right-hand graphic, this concept is incredibly usable and dynamic and I think it would do pretty well for something on my channel. Even if I don't do a phases video or a steps video or a stages video, I think that this would do really well.

Miami Cloud says, 'Thanks. I'll check it out. I have some older videos that I need a thumbnail makeover on. I haven't had time, but this would help me so I could focus on creating new videos. ' Yeah, that's the thing about this is the speed. The speed is incredible. And again, just getting to a good result. Yeah, you change the thumbnail when you see the views are low. Yeah, absolutely.

So, like I said, I'm a I'm a graphic designer who can do things by hand, but at the same time, I just cannot work as fast as this. But if I put my same assets that I would be using as a graphic designer, which is what I do with this, right, is I can take um the assets such as I can go ahead and prompt it. Real advice for small YouTubers and all right. So if I go and I take that then I take this and then I have it generate something. We're going to see what it does there. But again, it's how quickly and how uh capable this is, especially with the new model that they have here. And then I've also shown you what can be done with the revisions because that was the struggle before too. Generating something that looks good, generating something custom that so it's not generic and then generating the revisions and the variations because everyone's complaint about AI thumbnails is, oh, they all look the same. But these do not look generic at all.

You guys can tell me in the chat or in the comments. Be honest with me about how you feel these look as I'm doing them for these different channels. So hopefully this one doesn't crash out on me. Again, my own fault for having so many tabs open and using Firefox instead of Chrome. Oh, excuse me. But yeah, I'm also happy to answer any other questions you guys have about this because like I said, I think if more of you were doing this instead of struggle busing in Photoshop or Canva knowing you don't have the background, knowing you don't have the skills, and that's no offense to anybody. I spent years getting these skills.

Um, if you just focused instead on can I make really good photography with poses and props of myself, can I get good product shots, can I get um, you know, good assets, and then can I bring them in here? And then can I give it some directions? You can instantly generate much better images for your YouTube thumbnails.

Hey, Angela. Uh, yeah, Angela and I actually just had a coaching call. Um, it was either this week or it was it last week. Actually, it was last week. I think it was before I, uh, went to Florida. Yeah, the generated thumbnails look great. Maybe this is something I can use to revamp my thumbnails. Yeah, absolutely. Ryan Ryan Depal says, 'Uh, they look good. I've been using one of 10 thumbnails for my daughter's channel and if I'm not happy with the results, I use Nano Banana to help me with the revision. ' Yeah, absolutely.

One of the things that concerns me about a lot of AI generate thumbnails is they look tech forward to me and I'm a beauty.

Channel and I want something with a very feminine approach. You can actually prompt it for that on your side. Um, on your side, you would be able to prompt it for that because um, again, it gives me a very different for for my different channels, it gives me different looks because for the photography channel, for the creator gear guide channel, it gives me something very different than what it gives me for the Roberto Blake channel. And it's because I used product photography um of the Sony cameras. And you can see it gives me a much different look, different color scheme, even a different approach to the fonts because it understands it's a different channel. Uh, and it goes more photocentric than design centric when it's trying to accomplish that even based on the prompt I give it for what the title is. Um, for example, for the wildlife stuff, look at this. This is what it gave me on the wildlife stuff. So again, it's a completely different look for whatever channel you're doing. And so you don't have to worry about one, everything being generic. It's not going to be everything's generic. Number two, it's going to go off of the basis of what the channel is about and even what you previously have done.

And then uh, again, if you do what I do and you upload assets into it, it will be able to use those assets to get you a better result. And this will work for gaming. This will work for beauty. This will work for lifestyle. This will work for vlogging. This will work for talking head. This will clearly work for product stuff. Um, if I switch over to my music channel, if I switch over to Zenbuster Music and I go Lowi Beats to help you relax. And then what I'm going to do differently here is I'm going to upload a new image. So, it's going to prompt me to upload an image. Um, let's see. Hang on. I have to find an image that I can use for this that fits the lowfi channel because I think I downloaded an asset that I had made for the lowfi channel. Anyway, um yeah, I actually do have an asset made for this that was done by an artist, so I can use that. Uh, did it upload.

Hang on. I might have to re-upload it. See, I had an artist handdraw um something for my lowfi channel. So, if I just pick that image file is too large. Maximum size 5 gigabytes. Hang on. Oh, that was okay. I have a find a JPEG instead of PNG. We'll use this. This should be small. All right. So, we picked the ZenBuster music channel. We gave it the title Lowi Beats. Actually, I'm going to go further. I'm going to say cozy lowfi beats to help you relax.

Give it this image and we'll see what it does for our lowfi music channel just to show you how radically different it can produce results and that it can genu uh generate like a softer and maybe even a female aesthetic. since we're going to be giving it a uh female character that was designed based on uh my sisters if they were anime characters.

Oh wow, these came out good. These came out so good that we could probably take this into Google Veo 3 from here and literally generate the whole bloody uh video for it. And uh keep everything about this image the same, but remove the glowing aura from the character. Yeah, this can clearly generate any aesthetic you need to. But again, the key to it in my view, the key to it in my view is the assets that you start with. And again, when you combine human work with the AI, you get better than what both did. Because remember, I took you I took something I had commissioned, right? I paid like I think 50 or 60 bucks for this commission, maybe more. um years ago and I took that artwork that was commissioned for my uh music lofi channel and then I threw it into this and I got four variations that are all really good and I could literally at this point now animate those variations off of that character that I actually own copyright free and clear because I hired an artist for it. Um, and then I can not only generate the thumbnail for it, I could literally generate the whole video based off of the image that it created. And there you go. It removed the RF around the character and it intuited to have the steam coming up from the uh teacup or coffee mug there. And this came out perfectly. So again, this can definitely handle a female aesthetic.

Uh, so you know, Angela for uh you you're still in the chat. uh it can definitely generate a female aesthetic and it actually can do really good and it's good at variety and it will take the context and themes of the channel into consideration. So again, we got some really good stuff here and it used the um character art that I commissioned a real artist for and it got a really good AI off of that. And it wouldn't have been able, I think, to do that if I just tried to prompt it with text alone. Um, that's why I am telling you all that if you use assets and then you base it off of that, it will uh do better.

Oh, it finally generated the YouTube one. I hate that when it loses for a minute and it will rarely do this, but it's again the new version is still working itself out where it won't get my face right. And in this case, it literally race swapped me. But we'll just get rid of that one. But other than that, the rest of these are kind of in line with a video like thumbnail I would make for my channel. Like this one. This one is something y'all would actually expect from me and you wouldn't know it was AI anyway. Like you guys would believe that I made that myself. And actually, I have everything I need to make this exact thumbnail, except I'd have to like probably generate that broken chain. That chain would probably be the main thing. And then probably the broken glass, but I could probably find broken glass um in Adobe Stock. Um but I could get really close to this myself without AI. It would just take me longer and that would be that. Uh this one, this is a good concept, but again it um lost uh my face. But this is a amazing concept even with the um holding the 01.

So all I would do is probably have it remove um this from um from here because again and also the edit thumbnail is in beta. when they um when they take this beyond beta and I'm going to make some recommendations to the team for this. It'll probably be actually easier to do a head swap where I need it to. But I could literally take this into Photoshop, do a head swap. I don't need to do a body double. I could literally go into Photoshop, just do a selection mask, do a head swap with Photoshop's AI, and I would have a perfect uh thumbnail from this cuz this concept is strong. This is really good. So, um yeah, let's see.

Hey, bro. Just heads up. Um, if you're having trouble with the one of 10 link, um, and using the discount code, try taking, uh, the HTTPS out of the URL and try just typing in http colon slash and see if that changes anything and see if that works for you. Um, let's see. So, let's try this. I'm going to uh paste this URL in the chat for you guys and let's see if this works better for you guys and see if you can use the link. So, let's go ahead and try that. And mods, if you could uh copy and paste this link that I'm sending and see if this works better for everybody who is trying to use it. And remember, if you just even if you just go to oneof10. com and you use code roberto at checkout, it should also work. But try this and see. U if not, I'm going to definitely message the one of 10 team and let them know that a bunch of you were coming through tonight and you were having trouble with the um code and the affiliate page if you guys are still having problems. Oh, this one's actually pretty good. And again, it's close to in line with exactly what you guys would expect from me. All I would do is tell it to take some of the red off my face.

In fact, actually, if I prompt it, um, leave everything else alone and just take the red glow off of my face. and then I'll probably tell it to reverse the arrow and have the arrow going up instead of down. Yeah, I'm going to have the arrow go up instead. All right, so literally All right, it did the perfect retouching there. It still kept the reflection in the It still kept the reflection. You guys, um, keep everything the same. Just have the arrow pointing upward instead. It's still crashing at checkout. Okay. um for anybody. Um yeah, for and um Doug, if you could if you could uh DM the one of uh TEM team and screenshot and let them know, uh then that'd be great, too. Thank you so much. Um and if anybody like if anybody's on X, if you let the one of 10 team know you're um trying to um check out using Roberto's code, but you're getting an error, let them know and see if they can uh definitely fix that. But, uh, if you use code Roberto at checkout, you should get 20% off. If it's not working tonight, uh, keep trying later this week, um, and see if they've, uh, managed to fix it.

If you're watching the replay of this, hopefully it's been fixed by then. Um, because I don't know what's going on on their side with that, but that would make sense. Uh, that would make sense.

Um, but yeah, boom. We were able to make two tweaks to this in real time and in seconds we got the result that we wanted. It kept the reflection in the thumbnail. It um took the uh red glow off my face and that came out perfectly. Uh we flipped the arrow. We did all these things that would have probably taken us a lot more time and we were able to do them very quickly. Yep. And I'm gonna try and see if I can DM the um one of 10 folks over an X. Just one second. Not sure this has. All right, I've let them know. Uh, but thank you for looking out, Doug. Thank you for looking out, everybody in chat. Appreciate you. We'll try and get you squared away so you can get this tool and get your discount um ASAP.

We're working on it. But thank you for letting me know. U but yeah, but overall I think that again we're just seeing in real time how good this can be. Um let's try this one. I'm going to try with the same character. I'm going to try cozy lowfi.

Beats to help your anxiety. Guys, we've literally tried product-based thumbnails. We've tried we've done how-to talking head personality-driven thumbnails and now we've done character-driven thumbnails. And so you see it's not just one type of thumbnail that this is capable of doing. It can easily do a lot more. And then I'm going to show you how to do a storytelling thumbnail that doesn't use a human. I'm gonna pull one of the graphics that I made and I'm going to find that here and I'm gonna send it from my phone to my desktop and then we'll upload that and we'll use it to do a storytelling thumbnail in a minute on one of my other channels while this is generating. Let's see. Mhm. Send those to the Mac Mini.

I wonder if this one is hanging. It could just be taking a while to come up with the concept. But in the meantime, I've downloaded my other assets because I'm going to upload a new asset. And I'm going to show you guys a how-to do a storytelling style thumbnail that doesn't use a face or a product, but will use a graphic I guess I can uh take your questions in the chat while we're waiting on that one to generate again. It's possible that that's hanging and I'll have to refresh. Yeah, we can take a couple of your questions here in the chat. I'm gonna switch this over to demo showing you guys a storytelling thumbnail and see how that goes. Right. Prompt and upload new image. That one is it. Where is it? Where is it? Know it's here somewhere. That's not it. I think that's it.

I probably could have labeled this better if I wanted to find it now. I'm thinking about it. There it is. There's what I That's the All right. And generate.

All right. So, we're going to let that asset generate a new set of thumbnails while I take your uh questions here because we're going to uh pull off a storytelling thumbnail off of that.

For those of you who do things like commentary and you cover celebrities or you're covering public figures, this can actually be really good for you because you can always get a really great photo of them and then boom, that's how people are winning in commentary news, that sort of thing, reaction videos even. Um, and so that's doing really well for people in that. For those of you who reaction faces, uh, this could be a gold mine for you. So again, just a lot of opportunity here. I do think this will be game-changing for quite a few of you. Yeah, I think Angela this this could uh potentially be very very good for you. Yeah, the photos are so crispy.

Yeah, with me again like I told you guys earlier, the photography aspect of this is key. And what I do is, and you guys see that I have good cameras, good lenses, but even with your phone, there's a way to get this. Like I said, the settings you want to dial in are f4 or f8 to get really crisp, sharp photography with everything in focus. Because when you're trying to get these shots for the thumbnails, you don't need a blurry background. You need to shoot on a clean background. A clean background, usually a white wall. Not stand too close to the white wall. Maybe stand a foot away from it. If you can use a bunch of bright lighting, do that, but balance it out. You know, you don't want.

And then also consider, and I should have done this before I went on camera. Um, a trick for you guys for good head shot and photography is to use these. These are um oil blotting tissues. Okay, these are organic oil blotting tissues. The um you want to get these. And so what these are going to do is you're going to use these and I learned this in my time in photography but also um working with people on production uh video production is you want to use these oil blotting tissues if you can't use powder and makeup and a lot of times you can't and this is fast portable and cheap. This will take a bunch of the oil off of your face and take a lot of the shine off your face. You want to use it definitely on the bridge of your nose, around your mouth, your cheeks, right up under your eyes, and of course your forehead. So all these places where you would have shine and oil. And as you can see, even with me on camera right now, you can see that actually takes quite a bit of shine right off me right then and there. So, you know, it takes it does a lot very quickly. Just a couple of dabs will do you. So, you want to do that and that'll actually make your head shots and even your on camera presence a little better. Sometimes I forget. I have these at the desk, but sometimes I forget before I go on camera.

But, as you can see, that makes a huge difference, right? Doesn't that make a huge difference right off the bat with this all this bright light? A lot less shiny, right? Lot less blown out in certain areas. But just because I did that one thing and so there are little tricks. Yeah, there are little tricks you can do like that that a lot of people don't know about. They don't have a background photography.

Again, a lot of you for thumbnails, you don't have a background photography or design. If you at least do a little bit of photography and you get at least the lighting good, you get your poses good and again, you learn to incorporate physical props like I do. Physical props. Uh, I got these off Etsy. Etsy is great for uh physical props. Uh, Amazon as well. That's where I get my giant pencil. So, as you can see, I have physical props. This isn't even digital. This isn't Photoshop. See, like there's only so much actual Photoshop and magic wizardry that I'm doing in the thumbnails. Believe it or not, a lot of people think it's all Photoshop or all AI generative. What I am doing is I'm using physical props and it makes my thumbnails unique and different. And a lot of people don't realize that. I was also one of the first people to start doing the pose with my YouTube um play button as well.

Um out of all the YouTube educators, I was one of the first people to make that a normal thing. Um I may not be the absolute first, but I was one of them for sure. I definitely am the guy who uses the giant pencil to do my thinking pose. And again, physically holding the YouTube icon. I'm one of the only people that went through trouble getting a I have multiple physical sizes of this as props. And so it's physical YouTube play buttons that are actually in my thumbnails. It's not all Photoshop or AI. Um it's enhanced from those things, sure, but I start with a physical prop in most cases. Um, sometimes I'll just use a placeholder prop and then if I need to Photoshop or AI something in, I can have it just change what the prop in my hand is. But a lot of times I'll actually use a physical prop. So props, poses, and photography are a big differentiator. And that's how you end up with unique images.

Speaking of unique images, uh, we just got back uh, some of my results here. Look at this. Aside from the fact that it totally lost the plot on race swapping me here and it got my uh face wrong, but it's a good expression. I can just swap that out in Photoshop. But these two, these two came out perfect. These two came out perfect. So, we're gonna um maybe I can keep that one because I can fix actually I'll keep those two because I can fix them later with Photoshop. Um but with this one, the change I'm going to have it make is um leave everything else alone, but change the text to Make sure it's capitalized so it takes it literally. I don't want to say algorithm broken because that just sounds too um dramatic. Facial expression is dramatic enough to sell it. So, yeah. So, boom. It made the changes I needed right then and there. Yeah, that's dramatic, but it definitely gets the point across. And now I'll have it reduce the text size by about 15%.

I think it's just covering up a little too much of the YouTube play button there. And again, it's it's going to do this pretty uh quickly for us. Again, I think this came out really good for a storytelling um style thumbnail. Yeah, I think that's pretty good. Um did it get a little smaller? Yeah, I got a little smaller, I think.

Uh, have I tried uh pixels? Um, I played with it a little bit, but I only did it on a trial version, so maybe I didn't give it enough of a chance. But again, the thing about one of 10 that you guys need to understand is that we're demoing the thumbnail tool today because it's the most important thing most of you need to utilize.

And then I wanted to teach you proper uh preparation for it by using photography. And I wanted a chance to tell you guys more about photography because it's it's a foundational skill for being a YouTuber honestly if you're going to be in your thumbnails is or if you're going to do product stuff is you want to get the photography assets right. So I wanted to take the time to tell you about the photography posing props and get that right and then use the AI tool to help you um use that as a foundation and then build on it.

But one of 10 is a complete packaging system that solves most of y'all's biggest problems. You can find the right ideas and topics for videos and validate them and say that they will actually here's why this thing would get views. You can validate the idea of your video topics using one of 10. You can then build the assets and then use the AI tool and generate a really good thumbnail off of that. You can find a good title structure and inspiration for that and know what's working already in your niche off of one of 10 as well with the title generator. You can generate variations of your titles for AB title testing. So you have the ability to build and generate thumbnails for AB testing, titles for AB testing. You can validate your video topics. You could also figure out the timing and see what's popping in your niche now and what's good right now or what's constantly performing and is evergreen. So, one of 10 is a system for you to get um topic, title, thumbnail, and timing correctly and it will do well. Yeah, the play button looks great because the play button is actually the asset that I.

Uploaded. And then again, like I told you, the other assets that I uploaded were my own photos. So, the reason the play button looks good is I want to show you guys what I did. I uploaded this asset of the thumbnail. And so, it had that and it had reference photos of me to work off of. So if your assets are good as your foundation, if you have good graphics, if you have good photo assets and then you do a good prompt, then you will get a good result from this. That's the key. And it will figure out the rest without you having to be a graphic designer or a digital artist. That's the key to this.

Um, in another demo, another time, we'll actually try out the sketch feature and the bi swap feature because I need to play with that a little bit more myself. But, as you can see, um, this does a really, really good job. Um, so this one's going to generate um another set of assets to tell this particular story. So yeah.

Oh, excuse me. I'm glad the stream is holding up considering all the weather issues and the fact that earlier today I actually was having mad internet issues earlier today because of the weather with these storms. Um, generally a little worried about the overall storms, what's going to happen.

Oh, with this one. This one came out really good. The rest of them kind of lost track of my face, but I could just um swap myself in Photoshop with that for a lot of them. But the layouts are really good for the rest of them. This one is probably the closest one to actually um doing it. And you that would be a believable facial expression of me. But I could also recreate that seeing the layout now. I would have inspiration if I wanted to recreate that myself in Photoshop and I have the assets. Same thing with quite a few of these. Um I could get really close or again if I didn't want to have to go through all the trouble in Photoshop, I could um do the same poses. I might even have similar poses to this because in this case I just use this asset. If I give it the reference and I tell it um if I give it say this to work with, we could probably see what would happen here. Now it has something to work with.

But yeah, how are you guys enjoying uh the stream and seeing this play out in real time with real images and what it would do for the different uh my different YouTube channels. We really love you guys' uh thoughts on that. Hip hop lobbyist says, "Hey, my mom and I were literally talking about you right now. Going to book that session. Shouldn't. " Yeah, absolutely. You should.

Oh, these came out pretty good. Um, I like this one on the right a little bit more than the one on the left. Oh, I like these two. I like both of these on the right more than the one on the left. And this one I could just photo swap a more uh similar photo of me um for this and it'd work out perfectly. Uh so I could just head swap myself there and it'll work out perfectly. This one's actually not that bad. >> This one's actually not terrible. I don't even know if I need the in 2022. Now it's gonna just randomly remove something because I typed it uh too soon. I hit enter too soon. That was my bad. But I think if I remove the in 2026 that that one's actually really good.

But yeah, again, I'd love to answer some questions for you guys. If you have any questions about this, like I said, and I'm gonna show you another one for the Loi channel. I'm going to bring in a new asset for that. I'm going to find another JPEG um that I had an artist make for that to again show you, you know, what happens when you have um the handdrawn work like, you know, if you want to use it in this particular way.

Um, if you have an artist that can do illustration for you, again, you can use illustration and you can benefit from that and then take it further with the AI. Um, yep. Let's use this. This is one of the first versions of this. That's it for the LiFi channel on. So, we'll have it generate something off of that for the Zen Buster channel. But it's just really interesting that again this is fully capable of getting multiple styles of thumbnails correct for different channels and applying them.

Yeah, a lot of people don't think about um the AI stuff. And again, a lot of people either um overestimate overestimate what it can do or they underestimate what it can do. But once you get a little bit more creative with it, it works out.

Huh. It did a really good job. Oh my god, it did a good job with these uh the two at the bottom. actually all four of them. This one contextually um I just don't love that it's a standing one, but it's fine. But from a practicality and a contextual standpoint, these three are great and are usable. The so usable to the point it got the details right.

It got so much of the details right. It got the panda hair clip from the original character design correct, which was a very big and specific detail that I had in the um drawing on purpose. It got that right. I believe it got the shape of the glasses right. Yeah, I know. It got the shape of the glasses. It did. It did it. The jacket, the um the shorts. It got it all right. It maintained the character fidelity spot on. The character fidelity and continuity was spot on. I don't know why I'm surprised, but I am a little surprised at just how crazy good it came out.

I could literally take this into Google Veo from here and have it animated for like next to nothing in cost for my account for my Google Veo credits in Veo 2 or three. I think I have access to both models which is really good right now.

take the music I had my ghost producers make, which was human. And so, because, okay, remember, I had a human draw the character design for me based on references, and I designed it again to be like, well, what if my sisters had an anime character that looked like them, right? So, I had an illustrator um that I paid multiple times to do character art for me. I've actually even paid an animator before to do this, but now I would just pay an illustrator and then I would just have AI do the animation because it's just going to be faster, more accurate, more of what I want and cheaper by far.

So, ironically, cheap, fast, and good. Um, AI is getting very close to cheap, fast, and good on too many things to uh ignore now.

And so now, um, all right, it gave me the thumbnail off of the original character art in a different pose, in a different context, while maintaining character fidelity. And from here, I could even literally have this animated. And then I did pay a ghost producer to make actual music, not AI generated music. And then, okay, boom, there we go. On my music channel, my Faceless Music channel. So, boom. Um, it would have that. So, this is really good. I'm probably most likely going to end up using this to be honest with you. I'm going to end up using this. I'm pretty sure um because I'll just have Veo, Google Veo animated and YouTube can't go, "Oh, that's uh this or that. " because I'm using their product. So, again, this is an example of what you can do with these kind of tools. So, with one of 10, I was able to um you do something really cool here.

And I can still edit uh variants of this. Um remove the waveform and leave everything else unchanged. And it's going to remove that little waveform there because I don't need it. Because if I actually want the thing that I would do manually that I would do for these is I would actually do the animated waveform in Adobe After Effects myself cuz I can cuz I actually know After Effects.

I should do a tutorial on this channel for um generating an After Effects waveform. If I do, I'll probably also um make some kind of download template for it. Um I'm actually thinking of selling a few of my After Effects files in a bundle really cheap. Um, so it's something I keep thinking about. So, we'll see if I actually uh do it because again, exporting my After Effects files and then just uh letting you guys buy them um for a couple of bucks wouldn't be the worst idea. It's just I don't know how many of you actually use After Effects or would care.

But, I mean, I have some really cool After Effects files. Like, I have some of these waveforms in After Effects generated. I have some particle effects and bokeh background effects uh generated. I have some smoke effects generated to where you could customize it, but you wouldn't have to start from scratch yourself. So, it might save you 45 minutes to an hour because you just have my files. So, I don't know if that's something you guys would care about, but we'll see.

Um, I have um been planning to do like one or two After Effects tutorials. Ironically, I'm not great at the basics of After Effects, yet I'm good at the generative parts of After Effects. So, I'm good at intermediate and some advanced things and then uh for After Effects, I really suck at the basics. That's the irony because I just went to VFX. I went to VFX in After Effects first and skipped over the basics to be honest with you. I just wanted to do visual effects and compositing. because back in the day that's kind of just the thing I wanted to do. VFX uh compositing rotoscoping key framing. I was doing all that stuff.

Um, but I ended up skipping over a lot of the basics. So, ironically, I can I can generate and I can map special effects features and I can do um a couple of superhero effects in real life in After Effects, but some basic things like text masking can't do it to save my life. So, just kind of an interesting piece of lore about Roberto is that a lot of times he Roberto can do intermediate to advanced stuff and not the basics. That's terrible. But to be fair, in my other Adobe programs, I can do all the basics and a lot of the intermediate and advanced stuff. uh Photoshop probably being one of the best examples, Illustrator, in design for those I can do all the basics and then intermediate and then some advanced stuff there. Uh Lightroom as well.

And boom, it took away the waveform, preserved everything else.

Shandra says, "Used to do After Effects, not anymore. As After Effects trying to utilize free as cost not to use. " Yeah, it happens sometimes. Aside from Blender, I don't know what would be a free alternative to After Effects. And I'm not sure that Blender would be truly comparable if I'm being honest.

But yeah, there we go. We get another one of these type of thumbnail sets out of it for a music channel. So again, it just shows you the variety of if we do different channels, we get different results and we can do all kinds of different styles. And then also what the editor is capable of.

Again, I think a really great example for a lot of you is literally just the product shots. The product shots I think are really healthy for a lot of you because there are some of you that you don't do talking head, you don't do animation, and faceless channels, but you do do product related stuff. And just realizing that if you were to want to really get strong thumbnails fast in a product niche for product review stuff, this works and it just is so clean. It's so fast and it works out great. It's just incredibly strong at this.

And when I was looking at this for my camera channel and the wildlife stuff, I was really impressed with just how good it can be and what it was able to come up with. I mean, that's good. I feel like this one was really good. I don't think that one was bad. I think this one's actually really good if I'm being honest.

So again, I was really impressed with the updates to the 1of10 thumbnail tool. I cannot stress enough how far we've come with regard to these to where again I just feel like it borders on what I would do or could do myself in many cases in Photoshop and I think that what you guys are seeing in terms of what it's capable of even in revisions. Revisions was the one thing I was like the AI tools are not good at yet and now we're getting to a place to where you can prompt the revisions pretty effectively and it works out.

So, I think it's actually getting there and I think this is much closer to the kind of thumbnail that you would actually even expect from me. So, I think it works if I'm being honest. So again, I could see this for most of you and instead of the way you are struggling currently with a lot of your thumbnails, I think a lot of you would benefit from going this direction because I think a lot of you are struggling for an hour or 20 minutes or 30 minutes to get a thumbnail that doesn't look nearly as good as what this could do for you.

But I think the key to it, like I said, is getting the assets right. Whether that's getting the graphic assets, getting the products, the physical products, and getting product shots of that, even if it's from the website, or even your personal photography. If you get your personal photography right, and then you use that, that's going to be the key. And you want to designate and select which photo of you you want it to use.

Yeah. A lot of smart people sometimes have a problem with basic things and then they're very good at advanced things. I tend to be one of those people. Yeah. So, we'll do a little bit more Q&A and then we'll wrap this up at roughly the two-hour mark here. So, I'm happy to answer any and all of your questions about this.

Do I have any eye drops around here? My eyes are drying out. I usually keep eye drops around my desk for exactly the reason that I'm staring at a screen so long and my eyes will tend to dry out. But I did not plan accordingly. I have my lens cleaner for my glasses and yet I did not bring my eye drops for my eyes.

Yeah, I agree. Double pulse. If you use assets that you understand as the foundation, then you'll absolutely get better results from the AI. I think everyone's problem is they overestimate AI and they underestimate it.

And I think that the key, like I said, is I can do some of these things, but I can't do them nearly as fast. So, it's the difference between five minutes and 50 minutes and the difference between getting one result in 50 minutes versus four or five usable results in five minutes. I cannot compete on speed or scale. And even with talent and quality, I can't overcome speed and scale. So, why would I? I would just combine the two.

So, I would put my effort into, okay, the photography is going to be me and it's gonna make it feel real and that's going to make it feel like, oh my god, AI, as long as it's accurately me. And then I would say on top of that, there are certain assets that I can make that the AI wouldn't even make or think of that I know that I want or that I've created. And then I can use those assets as elements. And then as long as I have that, then I'm going to get a result that nobody else is going to have because I have something custom.

And then for the photography, like I said, just even having physical props for the photography on top of the photography, the posing, the props are the key. Props are the key. So is your personality. Having that going for you, those things all give you the uniqueness because again, what people are worried about with the AI tools is generic, generic, generic. Oh, my stuff would look like somebody else's. But you can avoid all of that if you focus on personality, props, poses, and photography basics.

So, Miami Cloud says, "What if you don't have the photo assets you have? Will Canva type stock photos work to get started with custom poses of me? " You could, but then it becomes a little bit closer to more generic. So, you want to start creating the assets that would make sense for you if you can. So, you could do what you're suggesting, but those are more readily available. The quality and variety might be debatable. So, you could start there to get a hang of it, but I would recommend getting closer and closer to having custom assets and leaning heavily into the photography side of things and when possible commissioning custom assets or again going so far as to get unique props from Amazon and Etsy because I think that matters because again, uniqueness again. Roberto is giant pencil. It works. So, I think that that helps considerably in terms of that.

And then, like I said, little things with the photography. Even the little things like knowing about the blotting wipes and knowing that that takes the shine off of aspects of your face, knowing about the angles, for the lighting, if you wear glasses, for the glare on the lenses, just different things like that. So, understanding the photography aspect of it can definitely help a lot in terms of the quality of these things. That's why I wanted to lean into that.

Building your own portfolio of headshots and poses for your YouTube thumbnails, having the different expressions like, you know, ah happy, shocked, surprised, angry, disgusted, you know, things like that. Just having a variety of facial expressions, game changer. Just to have the assets. Yeah. So, I think that that would matter. I would do a variety of body poses that you could definitely use. And then I would also do a variety of facial expressions. I would do different angles, getting your different sides. I have like hundreds of photos when it comes to that.

If you're the kind of person for whom you think wardrobe matters, you could do some wardrobe changes. Me, I have like kind of built my brand going to more to the Steve Jobs era. A basic black turtlenecks, black long sleeves, black short sleeves, jeans, dark jeans, usually black, gray or blue or my business khakis or my khaki cargo shorts, cargo pants for when I'm traveling with photo gear in my pockets. So then I'll wear that for utility purposes. So I have a basic look that I use and that helps me just kind of keep style and continuity. Also makes it easier to cut out things in Canva and Photoshop to be honest with you. The hats especially help with cutting stuff out there. So again, it helps.

But for those of you who, you know, you like to dress and dress differently and have different looks or whatever, then yeah, take a lot of different shots with your looks, but try to lock in a couple of signature looks. Like I recommend that YouTubers, this sounds crazy to take it this seriously, but just set aside a part of your wardrobe where maybe you just have, you know, five or eight looks that you always use on camera and those are kind of your on camera outfits and they're your wardrobe like a character in a TV show and you just have kind of a wardrobe like a character in a TV show.

I literally swear to God to you that there in my closet there are just 12 of these exact same black shirts all hanging up on a rack and they're like five copies of the same black turtleneck all hanging up on a rack and then there's my various merch and create awesome hoodies all on their own side of the closet. I swear to you that that's the case. And then after that, I just have like my jackets and I have multiple copies of the same hat. I have about to keep them fresh and because sometimes they get dented, I have like five copies of this hat. So, I literally did exactly what they do in television shows and cartoons is I literally just made a character wardrobe and locked it in and said, "Okay, that's it. Now I don't have to think about it. I have going out clothes for like going out to fancy dinner. Travel clothes, things for when I'm at events, when I'm not speaking on stage or for when I leave the hotel room. I have stuff for that. And then I have my suits obviously for when I need them. But for being on camera, I literally have just kind of locked in a very specific capsule wardrobe for being on camera for my YouTube content and for my thumbnails. And that just makes life.

It is easier. I found that it just makes life incredibly easier as a content creator to just do it that way. And then when I want to accessorize, it's mostly, like I said, it's mostly just jackets for me at this point, aside from any of my wristbands, watches, Apple Watches, anything like that. Again, it just simplifies the entire thing. Now, obviously for female content creators, you might need more variety. But again, my suggestion for that would be a capsule wardrobe so that your swaps are a little easier and that you can even make them seasonal. And so then it reduces a lot of the decision fatigue for what to wear on camera.

But I would also caution you that you also don't have to wear the same outfit on camera as you are in the thumbnail. I want to make that clear. People do not care. They don't. That's overthinking it. They do not care. They might not even remember by the time they click on the video if I'm being honest. Or they might not. They might be like, "Oh, maybe they wear that at some other point in the video because maybe the video is filmed over more than one day. " They don't know. So, don't worry about it. They don't worry about it any more than they worry about it when they turn on Netflix. I swear to you. So, do not overthink that at all. Especially for the female content creators, do not overthink the continuity between the outfit or your hairstyle in the thumbnail versus in the video.

Just don't worry about it.

Yeah, absolutely. Like I just believe that like if you're going to do anything AI, build it on a human foundation because again, I just think that when we combine the authenticity and the intent and emotional intelligence on the human side, maybe even some of the craftsmanship on the human side, but then you use the speed and scale of the AI side, that that's unbeatable. I can't beat a robot on speed and scale. I just cannot. Nobody can. No one can out speed and outscale a robot. You just aren't going to be able to do it. But you might have better taste. So if you can combine your taste with the robot speed and scale, you're going to have a better product than either could produce alone. That's what I believe. So I think that it just makes us better.

Like if I code something by myself, it might never get done. So what's the point? But if I vibe code it, it may not be perfect, but it's usable and it's there. And then if I handed it off to somebody to just clean up efficiency and security, you'd have a great MVP. So like that's where why people are vibe coding now is because ideas don't come out fully formed. You guys remember? You guys may aside from Stanley and a couple of y'all and Doug and a couple of y'all, a lot of you will not remember or understand how bad the original YouTube looked and how bad the functionality was. Ideas don't come out fully formed. It took well more than a decade to get to a really good usable version of YouTube. But again, now look at how fast we can get great products now. So, it's about speed, scale, and less cooks in the kitchen to get to the result. A lot less cooks in the kitchen to get to the result now.

And that's the same for your YouTube thumbnails. It's going to be the same soon for a lot of the editing tools. We used to have to have somebody do all this clipping and editing and take a long time and then get approvals to get short form clips out of our long form or out of our live streams. Now we all just use Opus Clip and it's great. So think about that. I mean it's just better speed scale and then you just add some human taste and curation to it and you're fine.

So again, I want to encourage y'all and caution you all to just not be on the AI hate train and to just understand how to use it to make yourself better to better your workflow to buy back your time so that you could spend more time on the human craft part because again if you don't have to agonize over something like again one of 10 helps you not agonize over the thumbnails. Now you can be a better writer. Now you can be a better video editor and storyteller. Now you can do more research. Now you have more time to do ideation on your topics. Now you have time to do these other things that you can be good at, whereas more time won't always make you a better thumbnail artist. So yeah, that's kind of where I land with it.

So again, thank you to our friends at One of 10 for sponsoring tonight's workshop. Again, you can check them out in the link in the description, but also again, if it's having issues or errors, let them know. Let them know that Roberto sent you and that you're trying to check out and get the discount. And I'm sure they'll stay on top of fixing that. But other than that, y'all, it's been great hanging with you. I enjoyed answering your questions. Thank you to everybody in the chat. Thank you to all the mods for holding it down. We'll be back on Friday, weather and God willing, you know. We'll be back on Friday for YouTube channel reviews. I think that's going to be really good. I think it's going to help you guys out. Again, our friends at One of 10 will be helping us out sponsoring that. Now you guys know like what you need to do to fix your thumbnails, right? So, I think this is going to be incredibly helpful for a lot of you.

So I can't wait for that. Again, hopefully we're all safe, the weather's good, and we'll be able to do that. But I will hopefully see you guys back here on Friday evening. So stay awesome and we will see you next time, take care and be safe.

Becoming a content creator can be a very lonely process and adventure, but it doesn't have to be. When I first got started going from zero to 100,000 subscribers, I had to do it all by myself. I didn't have a community of like-minded and like-hearted creators to talk to or to ask for advice. And I certainly didn't have a mentor to guide me along the way. I built the Awesome Creator Academy Pro Group because when I was getting started, what would have meant the world to me is not to have to struggle alone when it comes to being a full-time content creator. If I had had a community of creators that I could talk to and share information with, I would have avoided a lot of mistakes in my early career and there would have been opportunities with brand deals where I would have gotten a better understanding of how to negotiate and I wouldn't have undersold myself. I wouldn't have been taken advantage of in those early situations. So, in the Awesome Creator Academy Pro Group, myself and our co-instructor Andy Rivera, we meet twice a week for office hours with our creators, and we share information. We talk about how we're building our creator businesses, and we offer constructive criticism and critique on the things that we're working on for our projects. You'll be part of a community of usually around a hundred like-minded creators who are taking this seriously, just like you are. You also have all access as a progroup member to all of our past, present, and future courses, training, templates, digital downloads, and swipe files. You have full access to our creator blueprints where you'll see our systems and the frameworks that we use to execute. You know, you always fall or rise to the standard of your systems. A lot of people really underestimate how important that is. We have digital download templates that can help you so you don't have to start with a blank canvas.

These done for you files are actually incredibly helpful, especially for things like your thumbnails, your media kits, and anything you need for your branding as a content creator to look professional. We have email swipe files that help you with reaching out to brands. We have great information in helping you price yourself and build your packages appropriately. And remember, as part of the pro group, you have the opportunity to ask questions from myself and all the other creators participating. And so this means that if you need to ask questions about a negotiation or a brand deal, there's something you're not sure about, you're trying to find a better monetization opportunity with merch or affiliates, you have people who have done it before, who are already making money that you can reach out to for advice. As I said, when I was starting out and I was flying solo, this is the thing that I wish I'd had the opportunity to be a part of and would have made all the difference in the world in helping me be an even more successful content creator. If you have questions, you can always reach out via support. We're happy to help you figure out if the pro group is right for you. Also, we do have the opportunity for you to become a VIP member if you also would like quarterly one-on-one coaching with me directly. Now, go out there and create something awesome today. And hopefully we'll see you in the pro group.