Canva launched their Colour Edit tool earlier this year as part of their suite of photo editing features, and while its effectiveness is very dependent on the particular photo you’re working with, I wanted to share a creative way that you can use this feature that you may not have thought of.
Specifically, I want to show you how to use this tool in order to quickly expand your brand photo selection.
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Transcript
Here is a photo I regularly use as part of creating the cover images and thumbnail images for my tutorial videos. It’s just a screenshot from one of my earlier videos but I like how this one turned out and I tend to use it fairly often, as you can see in this video cover image here.
But in order to create a bit more visual variety, I want to have a few alternate versions of it where I am wearing a different coloured shirt.
First I have removed the background of this image, and then I’ve downloaded it with a transparent background, and re-uploaded it into my Canva account.
So now I want to create some variations to use.
I’ll start by selecting my photo and then I’ll come up here to “Edit Photo.”
Then, underneath the “Adjust” tab within the photo editing options, if I scroll down a bit, I’ll come across this colour edit option.
So now I can choose to modify the navy blue here and change the colour of my shirt!
Okay, let’s do another one, so I’ll duplicate the original page and I’m going to do the same thing and modify the colour… and this time I’ll also flip the photo to change it up a bit more.
Are they wildly different images? No. But if I don’t have the time to sit and take a bunch more photos for use in cover images, it can be a super quick hack to varying up the look and feel of my photos for use in my content.
One caveat I’ll share is that this won’t work effectively on all photos… it really depends on the colours in the image and sometimes it can have an unintended impact on the other colours in an image.
For example, if I try to do the same approach with this image here, you’ll see that it goes a bit wonky in my skin tone because it’s picking up on a bit of that colour in my face. So I can’t guarantee this will work with all your images, but for the photos it does work on, I’ve found it to be super handy to create a bit more variety in my video cover images.
