Canva AI Tools Review: Game-Changing Tools (FIRST LOOK)
Let’s begin our Canva AI tools review and get acquainted with the new design AI tools.
Canva has a ginormous update and Adobe should be quaking in its boots.
We’ve got some exciting features being able to turn tech into presentations immediately, editing photos with AI, and much more.
The popular all-in-one design tool is now getting in on the AI action.
And they have 10 remarkable features that they have added to their plan.
And we’re gonna break them down one by one so you can understand what it is now possible to do inside Canva.
This is an exciting time to be alive because all of the major players in the game are releasing and showing their hands concerning AI.
It is a race to get the product market fit for these new technologies.
There’s a lot of money to be made.
There is a lot of time to be saved.
Without further ado, here’s our Canva AI tools review.
Let’s start exploring Canva’s offerings.
Table of Contents
Magic Design
Number one is Magic Design in our Canva AI tools review
You can easily upload an image and Canva will generate a template based on the asset that you upload.
This is a functional AI tool that leverages template design from their AI algorithm.
It understands the content that you upload and it gives you a layout, a color palette, and a text combination to use in your design.
Let’s take a look at how it works. here.
Here I’ve uploaded a photo of a spaceship that I created in Mid-journey.
Outputs of Magic Design
And now it’s giving us a Facebook cover page, and a YouTube profile picture, for all those spaceship lovers out there, an Instagram post, a story for either Instagram or YouTube video.
Let’s have a look at the video it’s given us.
Wow!
It’s pretty awesome just by uploading an image.
You can see that the stock that they’ve added in the background, this geometric landscape, fits fairly well with the content.
But what I can see here is that they’ve based it on a template that already exists.
So essentially, they’ve taken a template and just changed one image,
They’ve also changed the typography.
But I prefer the original typography from the template.
Several players have been trying to create their own AI graphic design tools.
These tools allow you to simply input an asset or a text prompt to output fully working comprehensive documents.
Microsoft released Microsoft designer which was fairly underwhelming.
Adobe has shed its response and it looks more promising.
Yet out of my explorations, Canva’s tool at the moment looks like the most comprehensive available tech for graphic design.
YouTube Thumbnail Output
Here is a YouTube thumbnail.
Not bad.
So all you have to do to use this Magic Design tool is, you have to go to Media, go to upload a file, and choose an image that you would like to use.
This time I’m using a portrait photo that I generated in Midjourney a beautiful redhead woman whilst the AI does its magic.
There’s a lot of sitting back and relaxing these days with AI tools.
I suppose that’s the future of humanity, endless relaxation time for leisure.
It’s also important to note that I’m using just the free version of Canva here.
So these tools are currently available to everyone without being hidden behind a paywall.
And this one has worked much better.
So it looks like it works better with full images rather than cut-out PNG elements.
And it’s given me an array of vertical-based media everything from a YouTube story to a flyer.
It’s interesting.
Revising the Output
Canva’s Sale, you can see I have a headline in here because I have added my piece of text in the headline option.
You can clear this and update it to anything you like, like Fashion Show.
And you also have the option to adjust the style from the top.
There is a Vibe or theme.
Let’s show you how these affect the output.
If you go to Photo, you can now see results and this gives you a much more constrained, middle-of-the-road aesthetic.
But if you go to Tech, you get something that is slightly more organic.
And these are great.
So you can simply click on whichever template you like best and use this as a starting point for your work.
Go to Customize Template, and then you’re into the normal Canva editor.
And you’ve already got your content put inside of a template that’s fitting for the situation.
So it helps you speed up the design process.
So let’s try again with my little face.
And you can see here it’s working this time with my face.
It’s giving us a video on the other side.
You can see here that it has a little bit of an error because it has outputted black text on a dark background.
Disgusting AI.
When will you learn?
Draw Your Ideas
Next up, we have to Draw Your Ideas.
Following many requests from our community, we’re excited to release a new way to draw across any type of design.
Plus, if you’d like a helping hand, we magically recognize what you’re creating and smooth out the shapes.
So you can add hand-drawn elements simply to your designs like these arrows or circles or any sort of identifier that you like.
To use this, you simply go into the canvas tool and you can find the drawing icon in the sidebar which is now called Draw.
Canva Assistant
And once you have drawn, you can come down to this tool in the bottom right-hand corner, Canva Assistant.
And you can quickly access anything, get recommendations, or search Canva.
All from this one magical button.
It’s certainly a good button and one of my favorites inside Canva.
Now you can align and perform different actions upon your shape layer.
They also mention that coming soon, they’ll be able to take your sketch options and match them to elements in their Library.
So you could do a small sketch of a squirrel and it will present to you some illustrations of squirrels that you could put in.
Or you could draw a simple symbol of a heart and it will show you all of the graphics available that resemble hearts that you can quickly place into your designs.
This is a great feature especially for bringing back some of the visceral, tangible feels of designing things with pen and paper.
And it’s taking the known interface of interacting with paper and modernizing it, giving us a quicker way to generate designs.
I’m excited about this feature.
I’ve had a lot of fun drawing my images and running them through AI art generators like Midjourney.
And I think there is a lot of opportunity to take this to the next level.
Translation
Next up in our Canva AI tools review is translating your designs with just a click and with built-in AI translation.
You can export your designs into several different languages with just a click.
Canva is doing a great job at integrating a whole host of different tools into one platform.
And AI translation is just another paintbrush to add to the kit with over 100 languages to choose from.
Going global has never been quicker or easier.
Simply add text to your design, pick your language and instantly convert your text and tweak it to perfection.
Magic Eraser and Magic Editor
Number four in our Canva AI tools review is a Magic Eraser and Magic Editor.
They are very similar to an in-painting tool you would find in Dali or Stable diffusion where you can simply draw over an element and erase it.
However, Magic Editor is much more exciting, where you can change an element inside your drawing.
The AI photo editor in Canva is a great tool, especially because there’s a large free offering.
And anyone can use this without it being hidden behind a paywall which is pretty surprising.
I wonder if they will remove these features from their free version soon.
And if they’re just using them as a marketing ploy to draw attention to Canva, in this exciting time, when all players in the game are trying to stand out.
How To Use Magic Edit
To use the Magic Edit tool, all you simply have to do is draw over the image, erasing the part that you no longer want to see.
Make sure to get the edges covered.
Press Continue, and now you’re going to put in what you’d like to see.
You can type in using your usual text prompts.
I believe this is built on top of Stable Diffusion.
So you can use your experience in prompting with Stable Diffusion right here.
Finally, you can go ahead and press Generate.
Now you can see, I’ve got a floating cucumber.
This time, I’m going to ask for a nice daffodil.
And I’m going to go ahead and generate.
This time, we should get a more comprehensive, cohesive piece of imagery.
Here you can see, we’ve got a lovely daffodil.
A humongous daffodil that is the largest daffodil I’ve ever seen.
This small bouquet works very well.
Adding Images
You can simply add your images by going to the Upload Panel, then use the Magic Tool.
All you have to do is select your image, go to Edit Photo, and go to Effects, which is the first tab in the top left-hand corner.
From here you have AI tools available.
You can see that the background remover and the Magic Eraser are Pro tools.
Magic Edit
However, they are allowing the Magic Edit tool to all users whilst it’s in Beta.
So, you can simply click on the Magic Edit.
You might want to have some fun with it yourself.
Perhaps you might want to erase your eyes.
I’m going to get myself some glowing green cyborg eyes.
Should I get the green cyborg eyes?
But you can see, you can quickly make edits to your face, and enter any elements in your image that you desire.
It’s a fun tool to play around with.
I can only see it getting better and better in the weeks and months to come.
But be prepared for this feature to be in the Pro version.
So make sure to try it out now.
Beat Sync
Next up is Beat Sync in our Canva AI tools review
This is a very interesting feature because, once again, it’s mixing media.
What it does is it allows you to upload a music track and it will automatically match the transitions on a video to the beats in your music.
So, you get some slick animations right on time.
The key to good editing is often Rhythm.
This tool makes it a whole lot simpler.
All you have to do is start a video project, add music to the videos, sync the music to the beat, and you can personalize your video.
From there, let’s take a look at the example that they present to us in Canva.
[Music]
Pretty impressive!
Magically Created Presentations
Next up in our Canva AI tools review is magically creating presentations.
All you have to do is describe the presentation you’d like to see.
And they’ll write up and design a draft for you instantly.
You describe your idea in a few words and watch it smartly fill the slides with your story.
So let’s see how it gets on at describing itself.
Here it gives us a few options and you can see it’s already started to generate more compelling text.
It’s changed from Canva AI tools to Canva game-changing AI.
Seems like everything is game-changing these days.
Everybody wants to change the game.
Why can’t we just keep playing the same game?
That’s my question.
It’s a level change.
It’s a platform change.
You have a few options to choose from.
My Thoughts on the Generated Presentations
I’m gonna say, I like this jolly yellow.
Go ahead and click on create my presentation to start rendering it out.
Or you can start again for new options.
And here you can see it’s already created some text in the introduction.
Canva’s new AI tools use machine learning to suggest design elements, color schemes, and font pairings that best fit your content.
It’s true.
Very clever.
AI tools are software programs that use artificial intelligence to automate tasks, make predictions, and improve user experience.
I would say that’s a little bit broad and I would probably not use such a piece of writing in my text.
You can also see that it’s inputted an image for us.
But it’s completely cropped out the most interesting part.
But you can make that yourself slightly easier.
Checking for the Accuracy of the Content Generated
Let’s continue seeing what else it has said about itself: Canva’s new AI tools.
Canva’s AI Background Remover can instantly remove backgrounds.
That’s true.
Canva’s AI-powered color palette generator creates personalized color palettes.
I have not so far seen an AI color palette generator.
So, it’s not necessarily true on that fact.
I would also like to see an image that relates more closely to the text.
Images Not Cropped Well
And once again, it hasn’t cropped particularly well.
But you can simply do that in a matter of seconds yourself.
It’s also got watermarks and it seems to want to prefer to use premium content to make you pay for the licenses.
It’s interesting that in this presentation, the color scheme is all over the place.
We’ve had yellow slides, plain white slides, and now this terracotta slide.
It doesn’t feel so coherent with the color themes.
Canva’s new AI tools will help you design faster smarter and more efficiently.
Let our AI suggest design layouts and fonts for you.
That’s very true.
And it’s also a good piece of copy.
Use of Cliche Elements
Though I have to say that the image suggested is hideous.
Do you agree that light bulbs are overused metaphors for creativity?
I certainly think so.
Overall, l I’m very impressed with the quality of the presentation that has been generated with Canva’s text-to-presentation tool.
However, my only criticisms at the moment are, is that it seems to only present premium images to use in your presentation.
And the metaphors it’s drawing between the text and the imagery are incredibly cliche, overused, and amateur.
But I think it could work more effectively with a less challenging topic.
I think finding imagery to work well with AI is a big challenge.
This is because it’s very easy to go down the road of these anthropomorphized robots for all of your imagery or use a light bulb for an idea.
Magic Write
They’ve also introduced their Magic Write tool which is a text-generation feature allowing you to easily create content directly inside of Canva.
So this takes a tool like ChatGPT and allows you to use its functionality when designing.
This is a great example of applying text generation AI to a real-life use case without having to leave the platform to go into another application.
You can see in this example, it’s asking the AI to list social media strategy ideas for a new product launch.
And it instantly suggests creating a content strategy to publish regular posts and other sensible ideas which are a great starting point.
Magic Write is also available in 18 languages.
So, if you’re writing in another language, they got you covered.
Text to Image Generator
They’ve also got their text-to-image generator.
But this is one of the less original and exciting features of Canva.
It has already been used to create more than 60 million images.
They’re also trying to work on some animation features for their AI tool suite.
The animation tool now allows you to draw an animated path for your elements to move along.
Brand Hub
Finally, we have Brand Hub in our Canva AI tools review.
Canva is using this tool to target teams and businesses to organize all of their diverse brand assets in one place.
Everything from their brand templates and brand guidelines to their fonts, graphics, logos, projects, and more.
All be available in a single centralized Library which is a little bit like a Google Drive inside of Canva for quickly accessing different media for your brand.
It’s great if you are working with a larger team and you want to align your different media.
More than 125 million people use Canva’s design tools and that’s up 35 million in just the last six months.
Canva is offering a real alternative to Adobe.
Canva is extremely accessible and it has a certain playfulness to its interface.
It also creates a platform where you can easily create across different media very quickly.
That inherently affects the user experience of Canva where there are so many different things that you can do in one place, especially, with it being a web tool.
It can be a little bit bewildering which is the exact opposite of their unique proposal when they first came on the market.
However, they do create a wonderful visual interface and they have such a great integration of templates.
They make it easy to create something that looks fairly good, fairly quickly.
Comparing Experience with Adobe and Canva
I spent a long time getting used to Adobe tools when I was younger.
And I feel more comfortable using those tools when I’m doing some real design work.
I like that they have a slightly more professional aspect to them.
It’s much easier to create detailed changes inside Illustrator Photoshop or Premiere.
But Canva has fixed a problem in the design software market and it will be very interesting to see these two Titans of the design world go head to head.
Canva democratizes design and allows everyone the ability to quickly generate meaningful pieces of design work.
And now with its AI tools, it is taking its offering to the next level.
I believe there’s space in the world for both Adobe and Canva.
And in some ways, they are not mutually exclusive.
Some people, of course, who would have used Adobe, are now using Canva.
But I can also imagine many people who have used Canva for a long time, wanting more control and nuance to their work, will switch over to Adobe.
Eventually, I think it’s a natural progression to start with the simplest software and slowly move up to more advanced software.
When I was editing, at first, I would use iMovie and it took me time to move into Premiere and feel comfortable there.
I think understanding some of the concepts around design work, and design processes are great.
You can get your head around first before moving into a more complex environment that gives you complete control.
Final Thoughts
Thanks for watching our Canva AI tools review.
I’m so glad you made it to the end.
Congratulations!
It’s wonderful!
I appreciate you very much.
Remember that Likes are free and watch this video for more on AI.
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