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00:00:01
How to Use AI to Make Scroll Stoping Thumbnails
585 Plays6 days ago
In this AI marketing podcast episode, Dan Sanchez pulls back the curtain on his exact AI-assisted process for creating stunning, scroll-stopping thumbnails in half the time. He shares how he went from struggling with likeness and design inconsistency to developing a reliable method that combines ChatGPT, Photoshop AI features, and free face-swapping tools to produce high-quality visuals for his show. Whether you're an overwhelmed marketer or a content creator wanting to upgrade your visuals, Dan's detailed walkthrough gives you the tools, mindset, and visual strategy to level up your brand presence fast.
My Favorite AI Tools:
- ChatGPT - https://openai.com/
- High Level Marketing Platform - https://danchez.com/highlevel
- AI Podcasting Tools - https://danchez.com/podtools
- n8n AI Automation Platform - https://danchez.com/n8n
Resources Mentioned:
- FaceSwap tool (various options online)
- Photoshop Generative Fill - https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop.html
- MidJourney - https://www.midjourney.com/
- Faceswap Tool - https://remaker.ai/face-swap-free/
- Canva (alternative to Photoshop) - https://www.canva.com/
- AI Automation Vault - https://aiautomationvault.com/
Timestamps:
- 00:00 - Why thumbnails matter for podcast growth
- 01:30 - Dan's evolution from no thumbnails to 90-minute designs
- 04:00 - The power of including a human face over avatars
- 06:00 - Using ChatGPT to brainstorm thumbnail titles and concepts
- 08:45 - The role of custom GPTs and style guides
- 11:00 - Generating visuals with ChatGPT and refining poses
- 13:00 - Face swapping with free tools to enhance likeness
- 15:00 - Extending AI images in Photoshop using Generative Fill
- 17:00 - Adding and refining text manually for maximum impact
- 18:30 - Final tips and call to action for Photoshop tutorial requests
Recommended
Transcript
Importance of Thumbnails
00:00:00
Speaker
With every single episode that I publish for the AI Driven Marketer, I put a ton of time into creating the thumbnail. Because we all know that people do judge a book by its cover.
00:00:12
Speaker
And a thumbnail for a podcast or for a YouTube channel goes a long, long way. I even use it for my social media in order to promote the episode. And I highly recommend for anybody who's doing any kind of media, putting more time into the visual asset, the visual representation of the long form show. Even if it's a blog post, you need to be thinking about how to create a visual representation of it.
00:00:35
Speaker
And for a YouTube channel, it's obvious. Like if you're not creating any good thumbnails, like your podcast, your show on YouTube is just never going to take off.
AI in Thumbnail Creation
00:00:44
Speaker
And that's why I wanted to share with you my new process for using AI to build pretty nice looking thumbnails. I've been on a long journey of trying to improve the thumbnail and I finally feel like I've landed in a place where I'm like, okay, this is smooth. It's faster than it used to be. It used to take me 90 minutes to come up with a thumbnail is now down to 45 minutes and it's gotten better with tools like this new ChatGPG image generator and some of the AI tools in Photoshop.
00:01:12
Speaker
So if you're listening to this, I will say that this is a fairly visual episode. While most episodes you can get by with listening, this one you're going have to watch. But I promise whether you're on Apple or YouTube or Spotify, you can watch the video on all three or just come to danchez.com and find the video there to watch.
00:01:30
Speaker
So follow along with me and I'll walk you step by step through the process, starting with looking at
Evolution and Feedback on Thumbnail Design
00:01:35
Speaker
my YouTube channel. You can see like when I first started, I didn't even focus on thumbnails. Sometimes it's just important to start. And I knocked out nine episodes without any thumbnails.
00:01:45
Speaker
because starting is more important than perfecting. And then you can improve as you go. And you can see from here that I started this thumbnail design where I had this template where I was putting myself in the 404 TV head character.
00:01:57
Speaker
And it was an easy way to just crop out the image so I could have myself or the guests in the TV quickly. And I could use AI to fill in the rest of it. I've even done a whole episode. You could see like the AI design is here is kind of my old process that I used to use in that particular style where I was essentially dropping...
00:02:15
Speaker
the design, but these, even these took a long time because mid journey was the best, but it took a lot of image generation to get to just one usable image. Right. And we, I did this for a long time. This was my go-to. I had some, even like these ones where it was like, like very template looking thing.
00:02:32
Speaker
Um, but I stuck to that one style of using the TV head character on the right side. And then I started deviating and testing out different things. And some things work, some things didn't, some things were easy. Some things were hard and I kind of just meandered my way through all different kinds. I did find a consistent style earlier in this year where I was just using the TV head character as like a consistent character for the show. I thought we were vibing. I thought we were doing something good, but I eventually got feedback from everybody on LinkedIn saying, Hey,
00:03:00
Speaker
We like you way better in the images. You should continually put yourself in there because this show is very personal brand heavy. That's why I introduced myself as Dan Chaz. My friends, sorry, Dan Sanchez, my friends call me Dan Chaz, right? Like that's a thing. We have a thing going on and people like to see the person behind the show, especially a show on AI where there's a bunch of different AI driven people.
00:03:24
Speaker
podcast or YouTube channels out there where there is no person. It's like fully AI generated. And since this one's not one, it's just that that the topics about AI, they wanted to see the person, myself, and sometimes my brother Travis from Bot Bros, represented in the thumbnail itself to show that human side. Because as we go more AI, like people want to see the balance. They want to see the human connection.
00:03:48
Speaker
Or at least have a human like myself there as maybe like a bridge to the next
Challenges with AI and Human Representation
00:03:52
Speaker
thing. Which I respect. I get it. The problem with putting myself in there is that getting yourself in the thumbnails is a lot harder.
00:04:01
Speaker
But I went in, you know, I did the thing where you like crop yourself out and drop text behind you, like the typical YouTube thumbnails, like I'm looking at here with the major AI race thumbnail here. I did some AI image generation where I'd crop myself out, but then I'd have to Photoshop my face on because it could never get the face right, you know?
00:04:18
Speaker
It was always wrong. So I'd have to do the hard work of like literally cutting your face out, kind of grafting it on there, changing the lighting to make it looks like it belongs. That's this one right here, this how I beat AI with the human edge.
00:04:29
Speaker
that's That's a great image, but it took me a long time to Photoshop my face onto the body because the the image of the person was wrong. I think I created that one in Google's image effects, but of course it looked nothing like me. I tried to prompt it with characteristics of myself, but of course it's not going to look like me.
00:04:45
Speaker
And then ChatGPT, you know, is great, but it never quite has the true likeness of you. But I did figure out a way to get it back to looking like you in a way that's good and consistent. And that's what i'm starting that's what you're starting to see here um most of the time. Like the last multiple thumbnails that I've created have been this process that I'm going to show with you here.
00:05:06
Speaker
So if you want to use AI to be able to put yourself in situations that are just impossible to like fake, instead of just doing the thing where you take like a photo shoot and you have you know like shock face and pointing fingers and whoa, I'm really exasperated and excited, hands up by your side, you know, like YouTubers do, and then they do the little white stroke around them and all that kind of stuff, which I was never really, I just didn't want to do that myself. I wanted to do something better than that, um more closely aligned with like something like what Mr. Beast does, right? Like, those are $10,000 images. I wanted to get closer to that without spending $10,000 an image. that's Believe it or not, it's how much he spends because he has a professional, like, designer, hand like, hand
00:05:49
Speaker
hand draw all of them and in Photoshop, right? um So I wanted to do something more than that, but I didn't want to spend that much. And I certainly didn't want to take it that much time. But with AI, we can actually get pretty dang close.
00:05:59
Speaker
You could see some of these last ones have custom illustrations and it have me doing things and in a different certain lighting situations. They're not like super crazy, like me being eaten by a shark, but they are really cool and they're good.
00:06:11
Speaker
um Yeah, the fingers aren't always perfect on some of them. This one I'm like, wait, what is going on with the fingers? No, it's right. It's just not quite right. But nobody else would notice unless you were looking really carefully on this last one here.
00:06:24
Speaker
But it's pretty dang good. And at a glance, it looks good. It looks like me. It's not probably it's probably like 95% of the way there of looking like me. Enough that if you were scrolling through social or scrolling through YouTube, you would recognize these as me.
Efficiency and Quality Improvements with AI
00:06:38
Speaker
um This one specifically is a photo cutout, but you can tell the difference between these are all AI generated and this one's just a photo cutout because I couldn't get that one right that day. But I want to show you what I'm doing because, again, it went from 90 minutes down to 45 minutes, and I'd say the quality of the thumbnail I'm doing now is much better than the ones I was doing before that were either completely AI generated or were like the classic YouTube cutout or this like vintage template thing that I had going on here.
00:07:06
Speaker
So follow along. There is a few unintuitive things that you have to do in order to get it to look like this. So I'm going to go through the process. First is I'm using a custom GPT. You can actually generate these kind of images in custom GPTs now. I'll show you a little bit on the setup on the backside, but I usually use it to...
00:07:24
Speaker
I use a custom GPT called my show runner to help me name and then come up with the thumbnails. Now I built a separate part in my show runner in order to do this. And I'll show you that in a sec. But like for this last one, I just recorded this morning.
00:07:37
Speaker
um We i collaborated with chat GPT, gave me some and I'm like, ah like, I didn't like these titles. Like I asked for it, like, hey, come up with the title. and the title for the thumbnail, because you know you got text on the thumbnail.
00:07:49
Speaker
It came up with a bunch of different options. I like the title of one, and then use the thumbnail image title of the yeah of another, and put them together. I ended up changing it at the last minute. Because here, I think I had the title, Is AI Killing the Art of Marketing?
00:08:04
Speaker
Why So Many Are agg Grieving Right Now? um The great title, and then I had a thumbnail of k Craft is Dead, Long Live Craft. In the thumbnail, i ended up changing it to ah Craft Versus ai um to create more of a juxtaposition because it generally does well in thumbnails. But that's what we started with.
00:08:22
Speaker
I then had ChatGPT come up with three visual concepts, right? Three different ways to approach this visually. And I chose one. Now, how did it know what the how to come up with the visual concept?
00:08:35
Speaker
I had to train it to do that. I had to explain and give it instructions in the custom GPT to do that. So here I'm on the custom GPT side of this MyShowRunner for post-production.
00:08:46
Speaker
And in the instructions, it has multiple steps, but in part of the steps, it has step three, thumbnail strategy and visual style and support text. And it is just the explanation of what what I want consistently. it says, when the episode title is finalized, create a custom square thumbnail that grabs attention, reinforces the message, and fits the AI-driven marketer's bold visual brand.
00:09:09
Speaker
This call involves crafting both the visual concepts that are consistent with the show's aesthetic, And a visual style. And here's the visual style guidelines. ah The visual AI driven market thumbnails share a distinct scroll stopping look. Here's what defines the style. A man that represents Dan Sanchez. then it describes what I look like visually. Dan is a man with a dark faux hawk and short hair on the sides. His hairline is receding a bit. This is just me describing myself. I just gave it to him.
00:09:35
Speaker
it He has a tan skin complexion and light athletic build. He always wears a black V-neck t-shirt and blue jeans. Like that's generally what I'm wearing.
00:09:45
Speaker
i I just, I do the uniform thing. I generally wear the same thing every day. ah bold lighting and color, and then clean composition, high contrast, AI media mashup feel. And then I have a little bit, like, I essentially, I'm not going to read it all, but it, like, breaks down the visual look and feel.
00:10:01
Speaker
You could do this yourself. If you already have a look and feel and you're not sure how to describe it, give it three images that best represent the look and feel of the thumbnail or the visuals that you're going for. and it will create a style guide for you.
00:10:13
Speaker
That way, it's always within line, and every time it builds it itself, it pulls from these instructions and can create some consistency across your visuals. That way, you don't have to explain it every time. That's what custom GPTs are really good
Technical Techniques in AI Thumbnail Creation
00:10:25
Speaker
at.
00:10:25
Speaker
So take some time, put it in a custom GPT, even if that's the only thing your custom GPT does, is create thumbnails. This is a great one one-off use case for custom GPTs, is to create your thumbnail style, and now that you can do this in a custom GPT, it's a great way to...
00:10:41
Speaker
spin up a just a custom gpt for this i have it baked into a ah so final step of a different custom gpt but it worked nonetheless so it created if it wrote out a few different styles i said let's go with concept one but instead of a paintbrush in the concept replace it with a pen because marketers are more writers than they are artists even though i come from a graphic design background and i like the juxtaposition of the what what it was describing And then it gave me a confirmation. It actually asked me for an image.
00:11:15
Speaker
um I actually recommend this every time you have it before you create it If you're the one or you know the person that's gonna be in the thumbnail image, I always give it an image to work off of. I ask it specifically, like, what should the facial expression be in this image?
00:11:29
Speaker
And it goes and takes a second. It's like, huh, for this particular one, it told me i want the eyes slightly narrowed, lips pressed together, eyebrows slightly furrowed, head angled slightly down toward the glowing keyboard.
00:11:40
Speaker
And so I took a shot of me acting it out, of essentially a selfie with one hand and me actually posing and trying to create the face that it was describing in the other hand.
00:11:51
Speaker
And I got it. I actually took one more chance at it because it's like, hey, back up a little bit. I want to see what your whole torso looks like down with with this expression on your face. So you can see on my screen here, like I gave it the photo.
00:12:05
Speaker
This is a key part of the process. Always feed it a photo of the person you're trying to do. Not because it's going to get the face right. It's going to get the face wrong. But you're going to need that same photo in a minute.
00:12:16
Speaker
And it will pull from that photo. So... Here, I gave it the photo. It did a good job of coming up with the general gesture. the It's got the black v-neck. It's got my hairline right and my beard right, but the face isn't quite right.
00:12:31
Speaker
But still, this is this is a good working point, but this clearly isn't my face. um I even tried one other shot to make it a little bit more moody, but it it it just went off the deep end and got too too dark. So I just I ended up going with this one.
00:12:44
Speaker
Now, the next step in this is the step that I learned recently that made this all worthwhile. And it doesn't always work perfectly. You might have to go back and forth between the step I just described and this next step. But it makes a huge difference most of the time for me.
00:12:58
Speaker
is there are free tools online for face swapping so i just googled free face swapping there might be a better tool out there for this but this one was recommended to me from somebody else and you can upload here and i think you can do this for free i think you get 30 credits a month i just signed up for with my google account and i would definitely pay for it if it needed me depending i don't know how much it costs but it can't be that much um And it just swaps the face.
00:13:23
Speaker
This is made for people to like, if you wanted to swap your face onto like Harrison Ford's body, like this is the kind of tool for that. But I'm using it to take ChatGPT's image of me, but the face is wrong.
00:13:35
Speaker
And then I'm feeding it back that original image that ChatGPT used as a source to do a face swap. So when I click swap, i'm going to use a credit here. It pulls it back a little bit and gets it closer to the face that I made in the photo.
00:13:50
Speaker
And you can see right there, there it is. It's closer. It's not perfect. Because i sent this I sent this to Travis, my brother, as soon as I made it. He's like, bro, that's not you. And I'm like, yeah, but it's not all the way there.
00:14:04
Speaker
But it's pretty dang close. And most people on YouTube and on social media, if they've seen my videos before, will recognize it as me. And that's the more important part. I'm trying to make the boast of what we have right now. And this is the best I can get to.
00:14:16
Speaker
But that's still not the end. This isn't a full thumbnail. Like I need to drop some text. I need some space on the sides. So that's why going in to Photoshop is important.
00:14:29
Speaker
And you can see like you can drag something in. This is the full like ah Photoshop image here. Let me get rid of this line.
00:14:40
Speaker
It has to fit between these two lines for YouTube. And then a a podcast image, this is my own little hack, by the way, is the full square. Since I'm repurposing the podcast episode as my YouTube thing, I like to design it so that everything is in the middle and then ah so I could reuse the same design for the podcast thumbnail, which is a square, and the YouTube thumbnail, which is a rect like a horizontal rectangle.
00:15:03
Speaker
um So I always drag and drop it in the right place and then I use Photoshop's content aware fill which shortcut for doing that is literally just this this can't be a Photoshop tutorial because it would take too long. Let me know if you want a full Photoshop tutorial on just the basics to get by because Photoshop is a really powerful tool you can kind of do this on Canva too.
00:15:24
Speaker
um But I'm a Photoshop guy. I was a graphic designer, so I already know the ins and outs of Adobe. But if you want a deeper dive into Photoshop um and this specific tool called Image ah Content Aware Fill, let me know. If like five people DM me on LinkedIn, I will do a full episode on this. Otherwise, I'm just going to assume you either know Photoshop or can go look up specific Photoshop tutorials on how to do this.
00:15:46
Speaker
But you know, you select the photo, you invert the the selection area, and then you can go ahead and hit Generative Fill. If you even give it no instructions, it'll just fill in what we have. And I'll just go ahead and turn to the layer on where I've already done this.
00:15:59
Speaker
And you can see it fills it in. It's pretty much seamless. And now I have the full podcast and YouTube thumbnail covered. Of course, that's not it. actually got in here and noticed that this pen that I'm holding is gets kind of get lost in the darkness of my shirt.
00:16:13
Speaker
So another cool thing about Photoshop's image-aware fill is I just kind of selected the tool, send a little marquee tool around the pen here and said, turn this pen to white, to to a white pen. And it went ahead did that. And look, and now I have a white pen instead of a black pen. That was like really hard to do graphic design-wise. I'd have to go and find a pen and Photoshop it in between my fingers and do all the shadows and stuff. But Photoshop can now do that in just a few clicks.
00:16:40
Speaker
if you know how to use Photoshop. It's a lot easier than it was before. And then of course I came in and added my text. Now you can add this text within the image yourself. ChatGPT is actually pretty good at setting text, and i but I specifically told it not to add the text because I like coming in and fiddling with the text. And I came through a bunch of different positions and played around with the text until I was like really happy with the layout of it. I try to keep it simple, big and bold.
00:17:06
Speaker
And I use the same fonts every single time now. So I'm trying to keep it that way. um So I set the type. I'm also good at setting type. Type is a skill. Like typography is a skill. So like if you're not good at setting typography, just have ChatGPT do it for you.
00:17:20
Speaker
And then built just fill in around it and you should be good to
Reflections and Future Offers
00:17:24
Speaker
go. It'll be much better than what you'd be able to do yourself. If you're not a designer, ChatGPT is a better designer than you. So, and then that's the image.
00:17:32
Speaker
We went from ah just giving it a like a posed photo of myself, right? Where is it? Right here. Post photo of myself to full on thumbnail with text crafted.
00:17:49
Speaker
Now, of course, I have a different process for cropping this back down for the YouTube thumbnail. But you can tell just from where these lines are set where that thumbnail is going to hit because it crops from the bottom and the bottom and the top here.
00:18:01
Speaker
So. Hopefully it's been helpful to you. I've been working on this process and perfecting it and changing it, but now I've done this exact process multiple times. I know that it works most of the time. Every once in a while I have to go manually and do it, but for the most part, this is working for me. It's creating great thumbnails in a fraction of the time that look visually good and are getting the message across in a really unique and just visually interesting way.
00:18:26
Speaker
Hopefully this has helped a few of you. And again, if you want to dig deeper into the Photoshop's AI and want me to do like a more in-depth Photoshop tutorial and how to leverage the base, only the basics of what you need to know, plus the AI features, let me know. Again, I want to see five DMs. If I don't get five DMs, then I'm definitely not doing it.
00:18:43
Speaker
um because Photoshop's an advanced tool and it just, it takes a lot of time. Thank you to High Level for sponsoring this podcast and go to AIautomationvault.com in order to get your AI automations that I've been building specifically for a High Level that you can load into your own account in order to get started with High Level.
00:19:00
Speaker
And again, if this episode has been beneficial to you, please give it a thumbs up on YouTube or a rating of any star amount that you think this episode is worth. It blesses me and is a huge help for the show.
00:19:12
Speaker
Thank you. Thank you.