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How Can I Edit Photos With Canva Online?

Photo Courtesy: Canva

Once upon a time, only professional photographers could edit and touch up their photos in ways that were truly effective and polished. Photo-editing software and techniques used to be expensive and difficult. Times have changed, though; you can purchase affordable software to edit your photos these days, and much of it is designed with user-friendliness in mind. What's even better? You also have free options for photo editing.

Canva is a website that has a free photo editor that allows you to upload your photos and make them look amazing, using various tools. Canva also has paid options for people, businesses and organizations that need tools for graphic design and branding. Canva's tools for photo editing are intuitive and simple, and you can turn your photos into works of art with a few easy steps. Here's how to get started.

Make Adjustments to Your Photo

To access Canva's photo-editing tools, visit Canva.com and click on the Plans tab. Select the Free option to create an account and gain access to the site's tools. Once you have an account and are signed in, hover over the Features tab and select the photo-editing option from the drop-down menu.

Photo Courtesy: Matthew Leete/DigitalVision/Getty Images

Once you've uploaded your photo into Canva, you're ready to go. You can make easy common adjustments to your photo with the simple, straightforward set of tools. These let you alter the brightness, contrast and color saturation of the image by moving various sliders. If you overdo one slider or another, it's simple to fix what you've done by dragging the slider back.

You can also apply filters to your photos for quick fixes. The editor offers 14 different filters, and you can watch the sliders move to demonstrate how to achieve that look on your own — or make further tweaks to your filtered image.

Crop and Resize

Another great feature that Canva makes easy and effective is cropping and resizing photos. You can crop your photo by sliding lines and corners on the grid, or you can use horizontal and vertical pixels to change your photo. The resizing function allows you to use pixel numbers to make your image larger or smaller, and you can lock the aspect ratio or unlock it to distort the photo.

Photo Courtesy: Canva

You can also rotate your image or flip it horizontally or vertically. Your changes don't take effect until you click "Apply," and you have the option to reset any changes you've made before you apply them in case you want to start over.

Make Your Photo Fancy

Canva offers options you can use to enhance your photo beyond colors and sizes — you can also use some of the tools to make your photos fancy. These include adding lines of text to your photo to describe it or turn it into a professional-looking graphic for use on a website or ad. You can put multiple photos together into a collage that tells the story behind a series of images.

Photo Courtesy: Canva

Take your photos to the next level by adding shapes like hearts, arrows and callout bubbles. While you don't actually need an account to utilize the most basic photo-editing tools on the site, Canva requires you to set up a free account to access these extra features. However, they're free for you to use once you have an account.

What Features Come With Canva's Paid Plans?

Canva offers paid plans that allow customers to take advantage of more robust graphic design tools. The Pro plan is around $13 per month — or just under $10 per month if you pay for a whole year at a time. Canva gears this plan toward smaller teams and organizations, and it offers branding kits that allow you to tie all your graphics together with colors, fonts and themes. It also includes tens of thousands of templates and millions of stock photos for you to use.

Photo Courtesy: GERARD JULIEN/Getty Images

The Enterprise plan is for larger companies, and it costs $30 per month when you pay for a year in advance. This plan includes all of the features that the less expensive plan boasts, but it adds unlimited cloud storage, workflows for approval of graphics and changes, and access to customer support when you have questions.