Canva’s Background Remover tool is a feature that a LOT of us avid Canva users were waiting for so when it finally became available in late 2019, I’m pretty sure I audibly cheered.
Watch the video now to learn a couple of approaches you can take to removing backgrounds from photos in Canva.
Note that Background Remover is a Canva Pro feature and isn’t available on the free version of Canva.
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Transcript
In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to use the background remover option. Note that this is a Canva Pro feature.
The first thing you want to do is to start a new design and I’ll start a new Instagram post for the purpose of this example. And now what I want to do is I want to add an image.
I’m going to show you a couple of different ways that you can do this. If you just want to remove the background of a photo, you can simply go to your image that you want to remove the background from, and I’m going to grab my head shot for this example.
Now that I’ve dragged that image in to fill the space at the design canvas, I’m simply going to go up to “effects” and then I can click on background remover and I’ll let it do its background removal thing.
You can see that has done a pretty great job of removing the background though, if it didn’t, I could use the additional erase and restore brushes like this.
At this point, if I just wanted to have that image as a transparent background, I could download it as a transparent PNG file, like this. Then if I were to upload that back into my uploads area, you can see how it’s transparent in the background, and I’d be able to layer it on top of any design that I’m creating.
Now another way to approach doing the background removal of an image is if you know that you want to change the background on an image and that you don’t want to just download it with a transparent background.
This is where you’re going to run into trouble if you have removed the background by just putting an image into the design and then clicking on the background remover.
If I wanted to change this background colour easily at this point, if I went to the backgrounds area, for example — let’s say I just wanted to change the background colour… It’s going to overwrite the entire thing. We don’t want that to happen because obviously we want to be able to see the photo in front of it.
So we’re going to do this a little bit differently.
Before you add an image into your design canvas, you’re going to take one extra step. I want you to come down here to the elements area, and then you’re going to go to the grid section and you’re going to add a grid and make sure that it fills the entire space of your design.
Now go back to your image and drag it into the grid. We’re going to adjust this a little bit and now we’re going to remove the background again.
So it’s removed it again, like it did the first time, and it looks identical at this point, but this time you’re going to see something a little bit different.
When I go to background, I’m going to try changing the background colour again, and this time it keeps the head shot there and it just adjusts the background so you can actually change the background colour behind it this time.
But you can also change it to a pattern, or a gradient or a photo, or I can move my image out of the way and then I can drag one of my own patterns into the background like this. Or I could do the same thing with a stock photo.
So whether you want to download an image with a transparent background, or you want to remove your background in order to put your image on top of another background, these are the two ways that you can accomplish that.
