How to make a YouTube video

At some point, you must have wondered how to create (or edit) any of the Youtube videos you watch often. The answer is that numerous editing programs come into the equation, which require months of experience to learn to use. However, here’s the important part: Youtube also has its own production tools for doing all the most accessible tasks and within minutes.

The most famous video streaming platform in the world has very basic options for editing that clip of your friend’s birthday or your last vacation without making you feel like shooting yourself in the foot. We’ll go into how they work.

Step by step

The first thing you must do when creating a Youtube video is upload the respective clip. To do this, type Youtube in the URL and click on the arrow that appears just right of the search bar (as long as we’re logged into Youtube, of course).

The next screen isn’t too mysterious: we can drag or select the file we want to upload to the platform. However, if it’s a video that you want to edit, our advice is that you change the default settings and add the clip as “Private” or “Unlisted.”

Once we’ve selected the video to upload, Youtube will send us to a new screen like the one you can see below. Here we’ve got several options, though they’re easy to understand: the title of our video; the description of it; tags that must be separated by commas (not phrases but keywords, e.g. birthday, Christmas, New Year’s); and the possibility of adding it to a playlist (if we’re going to upload many videos on the same subject, e.g. “Summer 2017″).

Once the video is uploaded, click below on the “Video manager” tab and it will take us to where we have all the clips we own. Click on “Edit” to use one of Youtube’s strong points.

As soon as we enter, we’ll have the possibility of editing the video in front of us. The default field is “Information and configuration,” but we have to click on “Enhancements.” We can modify light, contrast, saturation, color temperature, put the video in slow motion, time lapse and most importantly: cut out the parts we don’t want.

On the other hand, we have the “Audio” tab. As its name suggests, it gives us the chance to add a song from Youtube’s extensive music bank. Best of all? The available songs are copyright-free, i.e. they don’t have ownership rights and you can use them freely (it’s not the same to add a song by Justin Bieber, who has his own monetization system within the platform, as one of the songs that are there for this purpose).

To wrap up, go to the “End screen and annotations,” where you can add all the text you want on the video, as well as annotations with links to other videos or webpages.

Our little guide to create videos on Youtube ends here. Try it out and leave your creations in the comments!

How to recognize a fake photo

Have you ever wondered if a photo is fake? The answer is definitely yes, since hoaxes and fakes nowadays are spreading faster than ever with the internet. Something happens, the snapshot in question is posted and… voila! It turns out that the photo isn’t authentic: either it’s been altered or it’s clearly an old shot being passed off as a current one.

That said, we’re going to teach you one thing: how to recognize if a photo is fake or not. Are you up to it? Here are three key tips for taking on the challenge.

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Google Images, our saviour

Believe it or not, Google Images is the best tool we’ve got to recognize if a photo is fake or not. How? Well, by using their tools to know the photo’s publication date.

For example, imagine there’s a forest fire and the (regrettably) classic photo comes out of a burnt landscape. Who says that photo wasn’t from a previous fire? To find out, we only have to download the photo and upload it to Google Images. When the search engine returns results, we can click on “Tools” and “Date.” Done. If the search results all belong to the period when the fire occured, the photo is an original. Now, if there are results from a year ago, when the fire happened a few days ago, you already know it’s a fake…

Metadata

All photos come with metadata. Always, we repeat. As soon as we take a picture with our digital or cell phone camera, information is associated with the snapshot for later analysis: the type of camera, technical info, date, time and a long list of other features.

To access an image’s metadata, you only have to right click on it and go to “Properties” and then “Details.” The problem? Well, social networks like Facebook,  Instagram and Twitter delete all metadata when the snapshot reaches their servers.

Luckily, that’s not always the case for all services, for example WhatsApp or mainstream media. For them, metadata is still available to look up. Knowing this can help you recognize if a photo is fake or not.

Increase the resolution

Our last tip may seem trivial, since the human eye comes into play (instead of technology), but it’s necessary: look closely at the pixels of a photo by increasing its resolution.

If you open a snapshot using Photoshop and Paint and see that some pixels aren’t the same as the rest, you may be looking at a modified photo. After all, if anything says “fake,” it’s a heavily modified pixel density.

We hope this little guide has helped you and you can browse a little easier, knowing you won’t get tricked by fake photos.

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