Cropping, flipping, and basic positioning - Canva Tutorial

- [Instructor] No matter what field or industry you're in, putting together meeting presentations, pitch decks, or simply doing a social post, all require some form of image editing. Being able to alter a photograph or simply position a creative element effectively gives you the flexibility to control how your audience is interpreting what they're seeing. In this lesson, you'll learn how to crop images directly inside the Canva interface, explore the flipping and rotation functionalities, and learn the basics of positioning. Now let's dive in. Here, we have two images. One with soccer balls in a green field and another with popcorn and an orange background. Imagine that you have to crop the first image as we only wanted to see the soccer balls in the lighter green. Now in a regular scenario, you would have to upload the image to an editing software, perform the image cropping, save the new image in the correct format, and re-upload it back to Canva to continue with your design. That's a bit of a headache, isn't it? In Canva, all you have to do is navigate to an image and double-click it. You can immediately notice that the background of the design gets grayed out and the focus is on the image itself. The little white edges on each corner is what allows you to crop a specific area of the image. You can drag them to the size that you want and crop. And once you're done, either press enter on your keyboard or click the Done button. Let's drag the image to the marked area on the right. Perfect. You've cropped your first image. Now onto the popcorn image. Let's crop it by selecting it and navigating to the Crop button. Once we're done, we can move the image to the marked area as well. Bear in mind, if you want to readjust your image, your original is not necessarily lost. You can double-click the image and either select another area to crop or restore the original image. Pretty cool, right? You can also play around with the direction of your image. You can navigate to the Flip menu here and choose to either flip your image horizontally or vertically. And you can do all that with just the click of a button. In a similar fashion, Canva allows you to rotate all of your design elements by simply holding the circular buttons underneath your image and moving them around the canvas. When it comes to positioning your design elements, Canva offers a super simple solution. Let's try it with the image that we have on page four. We can select the image and navigate to the position menu. If you select Top, you can see how your image immediately goes inside the box, which indicates the top of the page. Then you can click Right and the image moves almost instantly to the right of the page. You can continue repeating this with the rest of the directions and try all the different options available. And with this, you can see how these basic modifications can be quite powerful in creating an expressive design.