Creating Video Series Thumbnails with Paint.NET

For my YouTube videos that are part of a series, I like to overlay an image specific to the episode with a series image. This lets people get a glimpse of what an episode is about while also making the video's membership in the series immediately visible. To create such images, I use Paint.NET. First, for each series, I prepare the overlay:

1. Put together an overlay. It can even be translucent in some parts!
2. Create a new Paint.NET image with the same size as your episode images.
3. Make the first layer completely transparent.
4. Add a new layer above the first layer and paste the overlay into it.
5. Save it as a PDN.

When this image project is opened, Paint.NET makes the bottom (empty) layer the default. That's really convenient, because it lets me do this:

1. Prepare an episode image.
2. Open the base PDN file.
3. Paste the episode image. It goes into the bottom plane.
4. Do a Save As to produce a flattened, final thumbnail.

This process is nothing revolutionary; it's just that Paint.NET has all this polish that makes it great for these things.