5 Surprisingly Useful Canva AI Tricks to Save You Hours

This video will save you from doing pretty annoying design work manually. So watch until the end. Hi, my name is Diana. I am a Canva Verified Expert based in Barcelona. Welcome to our channel, the place where you can learn everything about Canva and AI workflows for creators. And let's start this video straight away with a Canva AI trick I wish we had years ago. Let's say that you have an old design in a JPEG or PNG file and you need to edit it again. You don't have access to the Canva document or maybe you lost contact with the designer who created it. Let me show you how easy it is to transform one of these flat designs into an editable one in Canva. You're going to go to Canva and on the left panel, you will see this plus icon that says Create. Click here and then from here, you're going to select Upload. From here, you can drop your content or upload your files with this button. I'm going to drop a JPEG file in here and it is automatically uploaded to Canva. You have two options from here, so using a new design or edit image. Go for the first one and then from here, I'm going for custom size and then create a new design. I'm selecting custom size because this is basically identifying the size of my visual and I don't know, I just want to keep the same ratio, same size as the image I have in here. So create new design. We're going to wait until the image is fully uploaded. It took just a couple of seconds and now from here, I'm going to select my image, go to Edit and then simply select Magic Layers on the menu that you see on the left. Canva is doing its magic and after a couple of seconds, you will see that your visual turns into an editable one that you can modify. Okay, this is ready. It took like really a couple of seconds and as you can see, I can change the text in here. So let's say that instead of 10 year anniversary, it is now 15. I can change maybe, maybe we have now a group that is Sunrise Runners, Brussels instead of Barcelona and you know, you can start customizing the design from here. This is pretty cool, but before we move on to the next trick I want to show you, I want to mention something pretty important. Let me go here to Edit and Magic Layers. As you can see, some of these features in here, some of these tools, they have this crown indicating that these are available for paid plans. Magic Layers do not have the crown, but it doesn't mean that you can use it with a free account unlimited times. Let me show you an article in here that explains this further. By the way, I'm leaving the link to this article in the description of this video in case that you want to read all of it and have more clarity on how these AI credits or tokens work. So we have in here different categories, Standard AI Tools, Premium and Ultra. And if we go a little bit down, you will see that Magic Layers is in the Premium AI Tools category. And if we go further down, you will see that Canva Free has a limit of 20 uses for Premium AI Tools. So that's what I meant when I said that you cannot use it unlimited times, you will reach a limit if you have a Canva Free account. On the other hand, if you have any of these paid plans, of course, you will have more usages available. So, for example, for Canva Pro teams and non-profits, you will have up to 200 uses for Premium AI Tools. So if you are using a Canva Free account and you want to really test and give it a go to Magic Layers and you want to have more than 20 uses, we have a free trial of Canva Pro in the description of this video. If you have been using Canva for a while, you may already know this feature, but I know many of you guys here watching this tutorial, you may not know that you can translate your JPEG or PNG files in Canva. So the process is quite simple and we're going to follow exactly the same steps as we did for the previous trick. You're going to go to Create. You're going to upload your JPEG or PNG file from here. And then from here, we're going to click Use in a new design. Now, let's say that I want to translate this design to Spanish. This tool has been in Canva for quite a while, but it's a little bit hidden. For this, you're going to go to Resize, which will open this menu, and you will see that Translate is down below under Magic Switch. This is a tool powered by AI. You can see here the AI sparks and it's also a premium feature. Let me click here and you will see in here some other options. You can translate to so many different languages in here. Let me search for Spanish and then you can choose a tone of voice. This is optional. I'm going to go for a friendly tone of voice. And then if you have multiple pages on your design, you can select the ones that you want to translate. And then you have the option to translate the existing design without creating a copy. You can check this box if you want to translate this copy right here or you can leave this box unticked if you want to create a copy of this design with the translation. I'm actually going to duplicate this page so we can have the first page in English and the second one in Spanish. So let me go again to Resize, Translate, click Translate to Spanish, Friendly, and I'm going to select page number two, Translate existing design without creating a copy. Like this, we have the same design in two different languages in the same design. And then I'm going to hit Translate. OK, this was really fast. It took really, I don't know, three seconds and we have everything in Spanish. OK, this is perfect. I think the only thing I'm going to change here is to keep the name of the group the same. So Sunrise Runners Barcelona and the rest can be in Spanish. And everything else looks very good. I'm just going to break these boxes and Sincosto is the same as Gratis. I'm just using Gratis because it's shorter. And then everyone is welcome no matter the level organized by Team Randy. Perfect. OK, now I want to do a remark in here. Remember that when we go to the Resize menu, we were able to tell that Translate is under Magic Switch and it is an AI powered tool. So I did my research before filming this tutorial and I was reading all of these articles that I showed you before and I couldn't find Translate or Magic Switch under these three categories that they were showing us. So I asked Canva and they say that using Magic Switch doesn't affect your AI usage allowance. So basically, there is no usage limit for this feature if you are using a paid Canva account. The trick that I'm going to show you now is one of my favorites because I love creating mockups. But what I don't like is to recreate the mockup. That can take so, so much time, especially finding the right icons or the right elements in the Canva library. You may find something that looks close to what you want to create, but not exactly. So this trick will save you a lot of time, but also a lot of annoying manual design work. Okay, so here I have, this is an actual screenshot of one of our posts on Instagram. So I really love this mockup, you know, like having our icon in here, the name of our account, like all of these details, these icons. And I would love to have this mockup so I can use it later on future designs. So as you might have guessed, we're going to go again to Create, Upload, and we're going to upload our screenshot in here using a new design, custom size, and then we have here the size of our image. If by chance you see some other size in here that is not the correct one, simply delete it and do this process again using a new design, custom size, and then you should be seeing the size of your image. Create a new design and we're going to use one more time magic layers. So I'm selecting the image, edits, and magic layers. Okay, this took about five seconds to be generated, but we have the mockup ready. So let me just duplicate this page. So we have one as the original design and another one for our mockup. So as you can see, I can move every single detail in here, but let's say that I just want to use the mockup and I want to create a different post in here. So I'm going to go to Uploads, use this image that we uploaded previously. I'm going to increase this size and now I'm going to delete all of these items in here. So let me see what else do we have in here. Let's position this image to center and there you go. We have now a mockup of a different post in just a couple of seconds. And again, if you want to change a couple of details here and there, you can do it pretty quickly because we are using canvas. So let's say that I want to use our logo in here because this one is a little bit blurry. I bring my logo and change it quite fast, like so. I delete the previous one and that's it. Trick number four, it's pretty simple. We're going to turn a flat image into an animation. So we're going to follow exactly the same steps of using magic layers, you know, uploading our image and then using magic layers. So we have an editable design like this one. This is the same one that we used at the beginning of the tutorial. Remember that we used this image right here. This is a flat PNG, if I'm not wrong, and we turn it into this editable design that we see in here. Now, what if I go to animate and I animate this text box? What if I do the same for this one? I'm going to use here an effect like wiggle. I'm just adding a bunch of different animations in here so you can see all that we can do in Canva from a flat image. OK, so I was adding a lot of animations to the text boxes, but you can also go to page and animate the entire design. I'm not going to apply this effect because when we passed this image via magic layers, we also divided the image in the background. So we have all the people as individual images. And when we animate the full page, it looks a little bit off. I don't like that. So that's why I'm applying these effects or these animations to the text boxes only. So this is how it looks now after applying some animations. Pretty cool, right? The last trick is also one of my favorites because we can completely transform a design like this one into something like this with just one prompt using Canva AI. So you're going to go to the editor and from here we are going to open Canva AI. You can use any kind of template. It can be a Canva template, a design that you created from scratch or something like we have on screen, which was a JPEG that we transform into an editable Canva design. So let's say that we are getting close to Halloween and we want to do a special event for it. I don't want to spend a lot of time creating this visual, but I want to post it on Instagram. So I'm going to use an old design like this one that you see here on screen and I'm simply going to use this prompt. Give this design Halloween vibes. I'm going to submit it. Canva is going to start working on it. And let's see, I'm going to pay attention to the time. It says that it's already editing the design, preparing everything. Okay, okay. It's pretty cool that you can see Canva AI working here on the design. It's been less than a minute, about a minute, still working on it and it is done. Pretty cool. It looks like a poster, you know. We have this effect. Let me see, what's the name of it? A neon effect with a orange glow behind it. We have all of these buds. And as you can see, we can move all of the elements in the design. This is actually pretty cool. Wow. And as I told you, it took about a minute. And we have these Halloween vibes on the three pages on this design. And after seeing this generation, I hope you can understand why this is one of my favorite tricks. And I'm pretty sure some of you watching this tutorial is already using Canva AI, the chat in the editor, and maybe on a daily basis. I would love to learn from you guys as well. Is there any prompt that you find very valuable and you would like to share it with us in the comments? I think this is the best way to learn from each other and to really make this a community. Is there something cool that you are generating with this chat or that is helping you work faster? Or on the other hand, maybe you didn't know about Canva AI, about this AI chat inside the editor. Now, I'm pretty curious to know which of these five tips you found more valuable. Let me know in the comments. And by the way, if you enjoyed this tutorial, if you learned something valuable or something new, give us a thumbs up. This is something free you can do, but really supports our channel. And if you want to learn more practical Canva and AI workflows, subscribe to the channel so you don't miss the next tutorial. Meanwhile, I'm going to leave you here a tutorial I'm pretty sure you are going to love. And I'm also leaving here on screen and in the description of this video, the 30-day free trial of Canva Pro. I think that's it for this tutorial, and I really hope to see you in the next one. Bye!