Meet MAGIC STUDIO - Canva's BEST AI Features
Canva calls their AI features Magic. And in this post, I'm going to give you a crash course in Canva’s, new Magic Studio. Without further ado. Let's hop in.
When most people talk about AI, they're usually referring to some type of copywriting tool, like Chat GPT. However, Canva’s AI features will help you with photo editing and graphic design. I have been absolutely blown away by what you're able to do, and some of the features are locked behind Canva Pro. So if you're using a free account and you want to play with these tools for a month, use my link, lashondabrown.com/canva, to get access to a free 30-day trial of Canva Pro.
Magic Design is an incredible feature that allows you to essentially create a design in a matter of seconds. You prompt it with what you would like for it to create, and then once you have the design, you can modify it with your photos and your information. So we're going to hop over into Canva, and I'm going to show you a practical example for how you can use Magic Design.
If you've been watching this channel for any length of time, you know that I create a lot of presentations. I teach virtually in my own community, but I'm constantly popping into others. Say for instance, I want to use Magic Design, because someone reached out to me and would like for me to do a presentation about Earth Day. If I were doing this before, I would start from a blank presentation or try to find an applicable template, and I would spend a lot of time modifying that design. But in this box, I can type in educational presentation about Earth Day and its importance, and then click on generate design. Here’s link to this landing page if you'd like a shortcut to get to this page, then I'm going to click on generate design. What Canva is going to do is to search through the templates that are available within the template library, and what should happen at the top of my screen is it should sort through it and help me find a presentation about Earth Day.
Let's see what our examples are. Celebrate Earth Day Together, Earth Day: Our Responsibility, Understanding Earth Day, and it keeps going like this is kind of ridiculous. So if you look in the bottom left-hand corner, you can see there are multiple slides about the topic, and not just with Placeholder content. I mean, they are pulling in not only designs, but relevant information about the topic. Let's take a look at Understanding Earth Day. This is probably the most extensive. This has not only got graphics, but it's got exercises for us to include. So if you find yourself in a position where you need to present, and it's a topic that might be relevant to a lot of people, consider using Magic Design as a way to not only save time researching but save time designing your slides.
The next feature is Dream Lab, which will help you to create a graphic utilizing a text prompt. Now, because I've used this tool before, you can see some of the search results. The prompt is above the gallery view of the images that I generated. And I will say this, some of these images are absolutely stunning. I typed in vintage newspaper background with sketch greenery, foliage, and botanical flowers. And I would say it pretty much nailed it. If you want to locate Dream Lab quickly, it's at the bottom of the taskbar on the left-hand side of your screen, and all you need to do is describe the image that you need and hit create. What I really like about this is, if you want to circle back and download those images again, as you can see here, it's readily available.
A great example of how to use Dream Lab is what I've been doing recently, which is utilizing the Magic features in Canva to create background images for my thumbnails. I create a fantastical image here, cut out myself from the background with my Canva t-shirt, and then add text. I have now sped up the amount of time that it takes for me to create compelling YouTube thumbnails because of this specific tool. You can also use Magic Media to do something similar, and I'll show you that after this. For this particular one, we're going to say fantastical background image inspired by forests and Earth Day. Now I can add an image. You can change the ratio by clicking here, but frankly, I prefer this specific ratio because that can easily crop it and make it fit a multitude of designs. So when you're ready, you're going to click on Create. Now if you don't like the images that it generates, you can always run the prompt again, and in the top right-hand corner, you're going to see how many credits you have left for the month.
That's absolutely beautiful. You can see here that at the very top, we were confused. Celebrate back forth. It's not flawless. However, this one looks great, celebrating Earth Day. I love that. I think it did a great job. Again, there's a couple typos, but overall, super useful. So you can easily click on the image, and you can download it by clicking on those three dots. You can click to edit in a design, and it's going to pull it over into a Canva template for you to edit. But this is a great way for you to generate images if you can't find what you need in the Canva library.
Magic Resize is more of an admin tool. In a previous post, I showed you how to utilize this tool to create a digital vision board for your computer and your cell phone. We created the design for a desktop wallpaper and utilizing Magic Resize, we were able to change the format from horizontal to vertical in just a few clicks so I didn't have to worry about creating a whole new design from scratch. This feature is pretty easy to locate, and I'll show you how to find that within the Design Editor.
This was a horizontal digital vision board that we created in that previous post. So if I want to resize this for my cell phone, all I have to do is click on Magic Resize, and then type in what I want to transform this into. In this case, we're going from a desktop wallpaper, which is 1920 x 1080 and essentially rotating it and saying 1080 x 1920 when we're ready, all we need to do is click, copy and resize, and it will take the horizontal desktop wallpaper and turn it into a vertical format. From there, you can modify easily to fit your needs. And essentially, we did something a little like this. Then all we had to do is click share and download, and we immediately had a digital vision board that we could utilize on both the cell phone and the desktop computer to remind me of what my goals were for the year. So that's a very quick application. I can also see people using this technique for events. You start with a flyer, then maybe you convert it into a Facebook cover for a Facebook event, a square image for Instagram, so on and so forth. A lot of people utilize Magic Resize to save time when they're trying to market something in their business. It's a very easy AI tool, and I would strongly encourage you to use it all right.
Up next is Magic Media. What's really interesting about Magic Media within Canva is you can utilize this to do multiple things with a text prompt. You can use a prompt to make a video, you can use a prompt to make an image, and you can also use a prompt to make a graphic. So in this example, I'm going to show you how to do text to video. The easiest way for you to locate Magic Media, if it is not pinned to the taskbar on the left-hand side is to click on Apps, and then I want you to look at the bottom of the pop-up screen. Under more from Canva, you should see Magic Media here. Now you can generate images, graphics, and videos, and depending on what you want to generate, you may want to click on a different tab.
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So graphics are here, videos are here, and images are here, then you type in your prompt. Now, one thing that is fun about creating an image is there are tons of styles to choose from, so make sure you click on see all because this has actually expanded recently. So you can do something to make it look like a photo. It can be more of a digital art style or a fine art style. So make sure you click on see all to see all the style options. But for this one, we are going to describe the video that we would like to create. You have a certain amount of credits per month. And so underneath generate video, you're going to see how many credits you have remaining. So just keep that in mind to really think through, practically speaking, what prompts really describe what you need, so you don't waste credits just kind of poking around.
Continuing the whole Earth Day illustration, we're going to describe an Earth Day video clip we would like for it to make just see if you can handle it. Now I will say that with the video prompts, it does take a lot longer than creating an image. However, this is what I typed in, video of someone walking through a forest, and let's see how it handled it. This clip is four seconds long. I can change the length just like any other asset that I would drop in. And I would say that is technically what I asked for. Magic Media is super good for things that are not really realistic. I use this a lot of times like I said for my YouTube thumbnails. If I am just looking for something captivating, then I will utilize images, or I will use DreamLab. So if you need a graphic that you can't find in the Canva library, you can type that here. But again, if you need a very specific video clip, this may be an option for you to create something specifically for your needs, instead of having to make a clip that's available work.
The other Magic features that I want to showcase are ones that are actually within this photo editing side of Canva, and I have absolutely fallen in love with some of these options that are available. Magic Expand, I actually did a video about how I turn vertical images into horizontal images and this is a fantastic tool to do that.You can see here, if you run into a situation where you have an image that you love, that a photographer took, but it's not quite right for like a banner background or a cover photo, you can actually fix that framing by utilizing Magic Expand.
Now, Magic Grab is unbelievable. If you find yourself in a position where you really like a stock photo, but the elements of the photo aren't in the space that you would like for them to be, you can utilize Magic Grab. I'm going to show you how to do that with an image from the Canva library. So this is a great example. I absolutely love this photo, but I don't love where she's located in the photo. I would like to have a negative space in the middle so that I can put text in the middle and have the plants on the left and her on the right. So to change that, I'm going to select the photo and then go to edit. From there, I'm going to select Magic Grab. It's going to scan at the image, and I can click and decide what I would like to relocate but I can also use the brush. So in this case, I'm going to hover over what they're allowing me to click. And it's a little too specific in terms of the little items, so we're going to make that brush bigger, and we're going to just generally go over this area of the photo so it doesn't have to be flawless. Then we're going to click grab. Now that Canva has processed our selection, let's see if I'm able to move her in the image without cutting her out of the background. Since the area is still selected, I'm simply going to drag her in the image. Now if I want to, I can pull this, kind of reformat it. Now I have negative space in the middle so that I can add the text where I want it. I can also make her smaller or whatever it is that you want to do. So I will tell you, this is a game changer because it will allow you to get more leverage out of the stock photos that are available. You can also use this on your own images. So I'll show you an example of that with a photo that I have uploaded to my Canva account.
I'm curious to see how accurate this is going to be so let's give it a try. Using this photo that I uploaded, I'm going to go to Edit, Magic Grab and it looks like it analyzed it pretty well. I'm going to use the click feature this time and grab it to be able to move myself to a different part of the couch. All right, so I am selected in the image. Now I can easily move myself. That is pretty wild. So if you need to modify a design because where you have elements located is not quite where you want it to add text or additional elements.
Now, another example would be the Background Remover tool. So that's another photo editing tool built into the Magic Studio. It's probably the feature that I use the most, and a lot of Canva users use it so they actually added it to the top taskbar when the glow-up happened. So you can click here, or you can also select it under Magic Studio and again, that's going to analyze your image. Cut yourself out the background. If you need to modify it further, you can click on Background Remover again after it's done a selection, and you can fine-tune and erase even more. If you want the brush to be smaller, you can change the brush size here.
Going back into Magic Studio, we can also do Magic Eraser. Say, for instance, in this image, we actually no longer want the plant. We can use the brush, or we can click. So we're going to grab this brush and we're going to say, Hey, are you smart enough to remove this plant from this image? We'll give it a rough selection here and click Erase. It did a pretty accurate job. If I want to erase some more, I can change that brush size and do some additional selections, but you can see here that got a little messy, so let's see if we can do a little touch-up here. So that's not bad. I mean, honestly, it's not Photoshop, but it's pretty dang close, and it's a lot faster. So that's something that you could do if you want to remove something from an image.
Another thing that could be helpful is, say, for instance, use Magic Eraser, you can also come behind and do Magic Edit. On the left-hand side, you can add things to your design if you want to include more in it that wasn't previously available. So we're going to say short bookcase with books, and we are going to select that area where our plant was, and we're gonna say, can you put a bookcase here instead of that plant? It's going to give us four options on the left-hand side, and you can click through and decide what you want to add. Now, again, these are AI-generated, but I kind of like that one, and especially if you're using this in a YouTube thumbnail, that's not bad. So that is how you can utilize Magic Edit.
The last one I want to show you, and we're going to utilize one of my T-shirt photos for this, is Grab Text. I've actually run into this situation before where I needed to create a video about a specific brand, but I didn't have a brand t-shirt for them. So what I could do is I could find a photo where a logo was pretty obvious on the shirt, and I can go to Edit and I can click Grab Text and let it scan the design and once it locates it, I could say, grab that text, and all of a sudden I can take a photo of me wearing a design from another tech company, and I can delete the logo off of it. The text is easy to select, and in this case, they have a little bit of a design here so I would just use the shortcut on my keyboard to add a rectangle color, grab it from the color of the t-shirt, and then I could overlay it on top of that little icon. Then I could lay in another logo from someone else. So if I wanted to go in and maybe select a partner logo. And now all of a sudden, this Riverside shirt is really a shirt for Voice Jungle, and there you go. Now you've got a cut out of me wearing a Voice Jungle t-shirt without having to do a photo shoot.
I am not always the biggest fan of AI features, but I will say there are so many ways for you to utilize Magic Studio to save yourself some time to modify photos or to generate content that isn't available within the Canva library. So again, many of these features are pro features, utilize my link so you can play around with them, and if you decide that you want to keep Canva Pro, then you can always upgrade your account, and those designs will be available for you within your Canva dashboard.
Thanks so much for reading this post. If you don't already have Canva Pro, and you would like to get access to a free 30-day trial while supporting the channel, go to lashandabrown.com/canva. Until next time, tata for now.
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