Pikzels

If you are a YouTuber or a thumbnail designer, you can't afford to ignore AI thumbnail generators anymore because these tools have become so good that it's stupid to ignore them. And every successful YouTuber these days uses at least some AI to make their thumbnails. Today, I'm going to show you a tool that is better than Photoshop, Canva, or any image editor. You don't need design skills, and you don't need to send messages back and forth with your designer. You don't even need to understand YouTube thumbnail best practices because the tool can analyze your thumbnails and then fix them with a single click. If you are a small YouTuber, you can now make thumbnails like the big guys who get millions of views. If you are a big YouTuber, you can use this to squeeze out a higher click-through rate for your videos. Instead of paying 50 or 100 bucks for a thumbnail or spending hours of your time, it now only costs a few cents and a few minutes. You can easily create multiple thumbnails and then use AB testing to find the best one. I will never hire a designer again that doesn't use AI in their workflow. And I use this tool for all my thumbnails now. In fact, the thumbnail of this video was created 100% with this tool. In this video, I give you a full walkthrough. We will create amazing thumbnails from scratch. We will remix existing viral thumbnails of other YouTubers and put our own face and twist on them. We will try different thumbnail styles and see how well the tool handles them. And I will show you my special workflow to create a certain style of thumbnails that I've not seen shown anywhere else. This video will transform your YouTube career and the only regret you will have is that you didn't watch this earlier. My name is Florian Walther and this is the AI tool corner where I review the latest AI software to find out which ones can actually improve our lives and businesses. The tool is called Pikzels and it's hands down the best AI thumbnail generator out there right now. I will put the link into the video description. They have a free trial. So, let's go ahead and create our account here. And the UI looks something like this. Here we have a chat window and a bunch of different actions. We can create a new thumbnail from scratch. We can recreate an existing thumbnail. We can edit a thumbnail using AI. We can brainstorm video titles. It's super cool. We can analyze a thumbnail and improve it with a single click. I will walk you through all these different options in this video. I will also show you a special trick for the recreate feature that I haven't seen shown anywhere else. So, make sure to watch this video all the way to the end before we start making thumbnails we should set up our persona. A persona is a copy of ourselves or another person that the AI can then put on the thumbnail. We will also take a look at styles later, but for now, let's click on personas and set this up. I've already created two personas, one for me and one for Elon Musk. Click on create to create your own persona. You will have to upload a bunch of images of this person, but the cool thing is you only have to do this once and then you never have to make a photo of yourself for a thumbnail ever again because the AI can generate your different reactions. But we have to do this once in the beginning. And here are some guidelines for making proper photos. There should only be one person visible in the photo, yourself or the persona you want to use. You shouldn't wear anything on your face like sunglasses or masks. And you should make a few photos from different angles and different expressions. Nothing special. And then you give your persona a name, for example, Florian. And then you have to upload at least 10 images. But again, you only have to do this once. So go ahead, make a few photos of yourself. I have these 10 images with goofy looking faces here. Upload them. Then click on generate. This will take a few minutes to set up this persona, so you have to be patient. And of course, if you use another person, make sure you have the proper usage rights. They might not want to be used on your thumbnail, but for most famous people, that doesn't really matter because they are used to be shown on the internet. And I just realized that I wasted 200 of my credits for setting up a persona that I already have, but I have to pay a price for my stupidity. Anyway, let's make some thumbnails. We will start with the prompt feature. This is pretty straightforward. We insert our thumbnail idea and then we can attach our person to put this person on the thumbnail if we want. Usually thumbnails with faces and reactions on them perform better. I already prepared a prompt. Show Florian hanging from a cliff with one hand and with a scared surprised expression. The focus of the image is his hand in closeup barely holding on. You also have voice input available. So you can click this button, brain-dump your ideas, and the prompt doesn't even have to be well structured or organized because we can then click on enhance prompt, which improves our prompt. So now we have a much more elaborate prompt down here. We can select for what format we want to make the thumbnail. Usually that's long form content, but you can also create thumbnails for YouTube shorts. Let's go ahead and generate this thumbnail. Again, this takes a minute or so, but it's pretty quick. Here's our first result. The face actually looks like me. This is like looking into the mirror. And we can immediately see this rating here. We will take a closer look at this later. For now, let's edit this thumbnail which we can do over this edit button. Here we can enter another prompt. And we can even select the area that we want to edit. Let's say I want to put a title down here. Let's try adding large, bold white letters with a falling-text effect. Here's our result. It actually has a lower rating. And for a real video, I would probably use this one. But when we click the compare button, we can see that we lose pretty much no image quality whatsoever. And this is very important because when I tried these thumbnail generators in the past, we would lose image quality with every edit. But with these modern AI models, you can add it to your heart's content and you will never lose quality. If you don't like the result, you can click the redo button to execute the same prompt again. If you like it, you can download it and use it for your video. Or, of course, you can do additional edits. Let's try another one. This time I attach Elon Musk as the persona and I enter this prompt. Create a before after comparison thumbnail. On the left, Elon Musk is a homeless person in the streets. On the right, he is rich and successful wearing a suit and there is a rocket in the background. The title says in bold letters how he made it. Again, let's enhance the prompt. And I want to see how the AI handles a comparison thumbnail. Spoiler alert, it will be pretty good. So, let's generate this. Okay, seems like I spoke too early because this is actually not what I envisioned. Let's try this again. Okay, and this is pretty good. So, we have this split screen here. On the left, we can see this dark alley and Elon wears these ragged clothes. On the right, he wears a suit in this futuristic office. There's a rocket in the background. The only weird thing is that the rocket is kind of inside the room, right? But we can use the edit tool to fix this. And we have a title up here. And we even have this cool effect where part of the title is behind the hair of Elon. So this looks very professional except for this little rocket problem here. Let's try to fix this. So I selected this area and wrote move the rocket outside the window. I don't know if this will work. Well, it made the rocket a bit bigger, which I like, but it's still inside the room. But actually, I think it's not a big deal. We could use further edits to fix this, but I would actually use the thumbnail as it is. We also have a face swap tool where we can replace the face for a different persona, for example, Florian. Let's give this a try as well. And again, the result is amazing and crisp. This is why I say you can't ignore these tools anymore because they've become so good. To be fair, my face is a bit distorted, but it still looks like me and the rest of the thumbnail is the same. As a little tip, if you have multiple faces on a thumbnail, it will by default face swap all of them for the persona. If you only want to face swap a single one, use the highlight tool to mark the face that you want to replace and then use the face swap. But this is by far not all the tool has to offer. Next, we try the recreate feature, which is even more amazing because with this, we can take an existing thumbnail and put our own face and our own twist on it. So, let's copy one of these Mr. Beast thumbnails. For example, this one here with these laser beams. So I just right click, copy the link to the video and paste the link into Pikzels using the recreate feature. You can also upload an image from your computer, but this way it's easier. Again, we can attach a persona Florian. And we can change something about this thumbnail. Let's say make the laser beams red instead of green. Generate. And now look at how close this is to the original. All the details are pretty much the same. The laser beams are now red. Now, I don't like my facial expression. I shouldn't look happy. I should look a bit scared and tense. But we can edit this now. Let's give this a try. Give me a scared/tense facial expression. Okay, this didn't work at all. For some reason, it replaced me for this random other dude. But sometimes you just have to try the same prompt multiple times until you get the right result. So, I just clicked redo on the original thumbnail. Then, it created the facial expression I wanted, but it made the laser beams green again. So, I told it to make the beams red. And now we have the result we want. So, there are still some hiccups with these AI tools, and you sometimes have to try multiple times, but these credits are so cheap that it's not a problem. Let's try another one. Let's try this one here because this is a completely different style. And this will be much more difficult for the AI. I'm not sure if it will be able to handle it. Let's try it out. Again, I paste the link here. Again, I select Florian or actually, let's try Elon this time. Replace the McDonald's logo with a Burger King logo and turn the dollars into euros. I'm not sure if the AI will be able to handle this because this is quite difficult, but let's see. Holy cow, it absolutely nailed it. I did not expect to get it this good. Look at this. The Burger King logo is completely crisp and there actually are euros in this briefcase. I did not expect it to be that good. And this took like 1 minute, not even. And we get a viral, high converting, absolutely professional looking thumbnail. And you might be wondering, is it legal to copy existing thumbnails like this? And you don't have to worry about this. We didn't copy the actual image. We only copied the general style, but we made changes to it. And big YouTubers do this all the time. They copy thumbnail styles from each other almost one to one. So, it's convention in the industry and not a problem at all. But chances are you already have a bunch of videos with thumbnails and you want to see if you can improve them. Pikzels has a feature for that as well. For example, let's take this thumbnail of my very first video down here. This chat PDF comparison. Again, I copy the link of this video. Then we go to the analyze feature in Pikzels. We paste the link or upload the thumbnail from our computer. But when we paste the link, we don't have to enter the video title because it will automatically pass it from the link. And here we see the same rating that we already saw a bunch of times before. So let's click on this. Here we actually get explanations for what makes this thumbnail good or bad. And every time you go through this, you get a lesson in thumbnail psychology and how to make good thumbnails. And apparently the problem with our thumbnail is that it doesn't have an emotional hook, which is true. It's pretty boring. And then we have this one-click fix option down here, which will automatically enter a prompt to improve this thumbnail and increase its score. And this is very low-hanging fruit to improve your already existing thumbnails without having to remake them from scratch. Here's the improved version, and I really like it. I think it looks much more dynamic, much more bold with a better expression. We only have a score of 70, so still pretty low, but I actually want to use this for my videos, so I download this. And YouTube has an AB testing feature. So we can upload multiple thumbnails and then after a few days we will know which of them got more clicks. But we haven't even looked at styles yet. With styles we can again train the AI but this time not just on a face but a whole thumbnail style. Here we can insert a channel link. For example on AI tool corner I have a certain style that I use on every thumbnail. I have this dark gradient in the background then a grid on top of it. Usually my face, yellow title, and some surprise reaction. So we can take the link of this channel, paste it into Pikzels or upload the thumbnails manually and then we select a bunch of similar looking thumbnails. If you use different thumbnail styles within a single channel create different styles on Pikzels because these thumbnails that you select here should look pretty similar. So select at least three in the same style which we then use to train the AI. Of course, you can also train the AI on other channels, but frankly, you should find your own style. Then, when the style is ready, we can attach it here to a prompt AI tool corner. And we can also attach a persona. Although, I think the persona should not be necessary because my face is already part of the AI tool corner style, but it also can't hurt. But there is one problem I have with this. We can't attach any other files here. But on my channel, I often attach screenshots of the tool I'm reviewing and add them to the thumbnail. So, how can we upload these screenshots to Pikzels and use them in our thumbnail? There is no official way to do this, but I found a way to still get this to work with the recreate feature that we already used earlier. But instead of link, we select upload. And instead of an existing thumbnail, I upload something like this. I prepared this in Paint. Very simple. I want to create a thumbnail in my style that includes these four smaller thumbnails in the image. So I put them all on white background just using Microsoft Paint. You can do this on any computer. I upload this file here. Then I select the AI tool corner style and then I use a prompt like this. Viral thumbnail for a video about an AI thumbnail generator. Show Florian surrounded by the four thumbnails in the provided image. That's this one here. with a surprised excited reaction. Title at the top, viral thumbnails in five minutes. And voila. Pretty good, huh? And this has the same style as the thumbnails on my channel with the grid in the background and this gradient. And we have our four example images on here. You might have to try this multiple times. Sometimes it doesn't look good at the first attempt. And this is how I created the thumbnail for this video, which is this one. Before we take a look at the pricing, I want to show you the title feature as well, which doesn't generate any images. It generates titles from your idea. Write a title for a review video about an AI thumbnail generator called Pikzels that creates viral YouTube thumbnails like Mr. Beast or other big YouTubers, and it only takes a few minutes and no editing skills. Then you get a few variations, and you can iterate on them via the brainstorm and the more feature. For example, we want to increase the curiosity. Mr. Beast secret thumbnail trick that goes viral. Definitely has a higher curiosity. You can play around with this. Let's take a look at the pricing as well. So, I use the ultimate tier because I want to have all features and I think this is still a bargain. Now, $56 sounds a lot, but you get 5,400 thumbnails per year. That's 450 per month. When I had a thumbnail designer, I paid $60 for a single thumbnail. And to be honest, Pikzels creates better results than the designer I had. You saw the results in this video. You saw how amazing they looked. So, I recommend to just get the ultimate tier by the annual subscription, so you save 30%. It's the one I use. And Pikzels is the best AI thumbnail generator out there right now. They are not paying me to say this, but I tried different ones and it's not even close. So, this is a tool that makes my life as a YouTuber so much easier. If you want to try out Pikzels yourself, and I highly recommend that you do, the link is in the video description. They have a free trial, so you can try this out for free. Subscribe to the channel for more AI tool reviews in the future. And then I hope I see you in the next video. Take care.