Youtube Thumbnail

YouTube Thumbnail Generator

Make a 1920×1080 thumbnail that is cohesive, catchy, and readable at small size: your real face + a 2–4 word headline + a brand logo on a dark, high-contrast scene.

Pick your own brand palette. The examples below use a clay-orange accent (#D97757) on near-black (#0A0806) with a cream headline (#F3EEE3) — swap for yours.

Working dir for a job (frames, cutouts, scenes, outputs): keep it under the skill, e.g. ~/.claude/skills/youtube-thumbnail/work/.

Three engines — pick by need

Likeness tip: GPT needs 4+ close, frontal face refs to actually look like the person. "Play with the font" → use B or C so the font is yours, not the model's.

Recommended path — examples + photos → GPT (reliable style match)

The most reliable way to hit a specific cover style (e.g. solid dark bg + an accent asterisk/spark + a bright highlight box on a key word) is to show gpt-image the style with example covers instead of describing it in words. Feed up to 5 references:

• Two face photos of the person (close frontal crops — see step 1 / 2b).
• Two reference covers in the target style — keep your style examples in references/refcovers/.
• One brand logo used on the cover.

Prompt: "copy the EXACT visual style of the reference cover images (background, accent graphic, terminal texture, heavy headline with a bright highlight box on the key word, brand label); use the person from the face photos — real face, shown LARGE and close-up on the right; headline <HEADLINE> with <KEYWORD> in a highlight box; render the text exactly as written; high contrast, no watermark." Then finalize (step 5).

Feeding examples is what makes the model reproduce the box style AND keep the text crisp. For fully deterministic text instead, use scripts/yt-boxes.mjs — solid dark bg, markup [[word]]=accent box / <<word>>=white box / plain=white text, real face cutout, brand icon:

node scripts/yt-boxes.mjs --l1 "[[KEYWORD]] REST" --l2 "SECOND LINE" --eyebrow "BRAND" \
  --face /abs/cutout.png --icon /abs/logo.png --font inter --out /abs/out.png

Pipeline

1. Face from video

ffprobe -v error -show_entries format=duration -of csv=p=0 in.mp4
ffmpeg -y -ss <sec> -i in.mp4 -frames:v 1 -q:v 2 frame.png   # -ss BEFORE -i = fast seek

Grab evenly-spaced frames, build a numbered contact sheet (ffmpeg tile filter), and let the user pick by number. ZSH gotcha: zsh does NOT word-split a * glob from a variable — hardcode timestamps or list filenames explicitly.

2a. Real cutout (engine B/C) — rembg

.venv/bin/python scripts/cutout.py picks/13.png cutouts/13.png

Vertical phone video (2160×3840) → resize to height ≤1280 before cutout (cutout.py handles it). Model u2net_human_seg via the rembg Python API.

2b. Face refs for GPT (engine A) — close crops

Tight frontal crops beat one wide shot; give ~4 different outfits/angles:

ffmpeg -y -i picks/13.png -vf "crop=1300:1300:430:760,scale=720:720" facerefs/13.jpg

3. Scene / base via gpt-image-2 (engine A/C)

Use any gpt-image-2 generator (OpenAI image API, or a Codex-OAuth wrapper) that accepts input reference images (≤5): pass the face crops (+ logo). Cyrillic text renders cleanly in most cases, but a literal → arrow garbles — write "to"/"до" instead. For engine C, prompt for NO text, left half empty so you can compose text yourself.

Prompt core: "exact same person as in the reference photos, preserve the real face/glasses/hair, do NOT beautify; subject on the right; dark charcoal background + a brand-accent glow; subtle terminal/code texture; high contrast; no watermark".

4. Compose text + logo (engine B/C) — scripts/yt-thumb.mjs

node scripts/yt-thumb.mjs --scene /abs/SCENE.png [--face /abs/cutout.png] \
  --logo /abs/logo.svg \
  --eyebrow "EYEBROW" --l1 "LINE ONE" --l2 "LINE TWO" \
  --font oswald --fs 104 --faceside right --out out.png

• --scene ABSOLUTE path (code does file://+path; a relative path → black bg).
• --face optional (omit for engine C — the face is baked into the GPT base).
• --l2 renders in the accent color. --faceside right|left (text goes opposite, with a scrim).
• --fs font size (default 150; long lines like a 10+ char word → ~104).
• --font: intertight (default) · montserrat · oswald · russo · unbounded · rubik · manrope · sourceserif · spectral (all Cyrillic-capable, thumbnail-strong). "Play with the font" = render several.
• Logo PNG from SVG: node scripts/rasterize-logo.mjs logo.svg out.png 600. Supply your own logo.

5. Finalize 1920×1080

gpt-image outputs ~1536×1024 → crop/scale to exactly 1920×1080:

ffmpeg -y -i in.png -vf "scale=1920:1080:force_original_aspect_ratio=increase,crop=1920:1080" out.png

QA: ffmpeg -y -i out.png -vf scale=360:-1 qa-360.png — pass only if the full headline is spelled exactly, the key word sits inside its highlight box, and every word is readable at small size. If not: regenerate once, then fall back to scripts/yt-boxes.mjs for exact text.

Setup (once)

cd ~/.claude/skills/youtube-thumbnail
python3 -m venv .venv && .venv/bin/pip install rembg onnxruntime pillow   # engine B/C cutout
npm i playwright && npx playwright install chromium                        # text compositor

For engine A/C you also need access to a gpt-image-2 generator (OpenAI image API key, or a Codex-OAuth image wrapper).

References

• references/recipes.md — palette, font notes (per-font sizing for long words), prompt patterns.