Turn imagination into reality with AI image generation apps in Canva

Design used to be complicated and hard, but today, more than 135 million people are using Canva every month to unlock their creativity and achieve their goals. Our mission has always been to make complex things simple, and tapping into exciting new ways to empower our community to bring their ideas and imagination to life is an important part of that.

AI image generation means the perfect image is always at your fingertips – even if it doesn’t exist yet. In 2022, we launched our own AI-powered image-generating app Text to Image in Canva. This magic feature lets you turn your imagination into reality by watching your words transform into stunning, one-of-a-kind images.

Not only is Text to Image enabling our community to create visual content faster than ever before, it also marks the end of the creative block. And now, Canva has three image-generating apps to turn your imagination into reality – Text to Image, DALL·E by OpenAI, and Imagen by Google Cloud.

In less than a year since launching Text to Image, we’ve been overwhelmed by our community’s enthusiastic response, with almost 290 million images being created and applied to a range of practical use cases from social media posts to presentations, business flyers, and even logos. Can't find the right image? Now, with access to the best AI image generation apps in Canva, you have even more options to make your ideas come alive.

Turn your imagination into creative images

Now, whenever you can't find the perfect images, you only need to find the right words instead. Once you’ve entered your words, rather than combining existing images, our AI image-generating apps magically create entirely new ones from scratch. From practical descriptions to whimsical concepts, Text to Image, DALL·E and Imagen by Google Cloud can all create one-of-a-kind images with just the click of a button.

So whether you’d like to see a black-and-white illustration of someone baking a cake, or a firefox standing up in a forest, our AI image generators bring your imagination to life and present options for use across any of your designs, from websites to presentations or social media posts. Gone are the days of spending hours scrolling through stock images when you need something specific or unique. Image generation apps unlock creativity in all sorts of ways and empower all sorts of people, from content creators to marketers, professional designers, and social media managers. Any profession that needs to produce content quickly can easily conjure up engaging assets to help them stand out.

Small business owners – who often double as their own marketing team among a million other things – will especially find AI image generation to be a useful (and fun) time saver that will help them shine. Artists, designers, and art students can also use the app to test an idea quickly, without the need for expensive tooling.

Integrated and seamless

Canva’s image generation apps are integrated across the entire Canva experience. With Text to Image, you can create and edit an image without ever having to leave Canva – no other subscriptions or tools needed to power your creative workflow. From dreaming up initial concepts to creating new assets for any design, editing them in your own way, then sharing them with the world, Text To Image can be leveraged every step of the way to see your projects through.

Enhance your new photos with Text to Image's built-in photo editor: modify brightness, adjust contrast, or play around with filters. Include text with eye-catching font combinations to caption your unique images. Crop images, resize, or flip, and match it with other graphics such as frames, stickers, vectors, icons, and illustrations. Then, make it dynamic with our animation options, and share it with the world within any kind of design.

We’re committed to improving our Text to Image app. As part of this, we’ve made improvements to image accuracy and quality, visually elevating your designs like never before. We’ve also recently added an image variation feature, which allows you to generate a new image with a similar look and composition to an image generated by Text to Image.

Images as unique as you are

Text to Image can now also generate art in an even wider range of styles than before, from photos to drawings, paintings, 3D, patterns, neon, and concept art. Create a lifelike rendering with a 3D style for your futuristic party invitation, or use the painting style to recreate textured brushstrokes. If you’re not sure which style to go for, try the ‘Surprise Me’ feature to kick-start your inspiration.

Safe, responsible and ethical technology

The world we live in today is driven by innovation – every industry has been shaped by it, and it’s an ever-continuing progression to a better world. New technology brings profound opportunities, but also raises new questions. We’re committed to learning and helping shape our magic tools and features to serve our community in the best way possible.

We pride ourselves on maintaining strong ethical values and this is reflected in how we build our products, run our company and engage our community. Being a force for good – one of our guiding values – means keeping our community safe is paramount. Our dedicated Trust and Safety team is committed to ensuring everyone feels safe creating and interacting with content on our platform.

We’ve invested heavily in safety measures that help the millions of people using our platform ‘be a good human’ and minimize the risk of our platform being used to produce unsafe content. For Text to Image this includes automated reviews of input prompts for terms that might generate unsafe imagery, and of output images for a range of categories including adult content, hate, and abuse. We’ve also created a feedback loop giving our community the opportunity to report any issues with the images generated, including if they feel they’re enforcing biases or stereotypes.

By partnering with leading brands like Google Cloud and OpenAI, we’re bringing the best-of-breed third-party apps into Canva to make AI tools accessible to everyone, all in one place. These apps have their own safety measures in place to safeguard their image-generation outputs and ensure their AI models are fair and ethical.

We also understand that there are many ongoing conversations around generated images and copyright and have pulled together this resource to answer questions you may have. While our work in this space will never be complete, we hope to share our findings and lessons to contribute to safe, equitable and responsible technology at large.

As we empower the world to design, we recognize the importance of responsible innovation and look forward to keeping you updated on how we’re bringing even more magic to our global community.

Convert text to images using Canva’s Text to Image or explore Imagen and DALL·E in our app marketplace. Go to Canva Apps or open a design template on your desktop, iOS, or Android app and start creating magic now!

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