How to add drop shadows to text in Canva

Hey everyone, let's explore some  of the text effects in Canva. Uh, basically they allowed us  to add things like drop shadows,  really good when we want text to kind  of really separate from the background if it's hard to read,  okay, there's some kind of interesting kind of cool effects  and stuff you can do with type add a bit  of excitement to your heading text. Alright, let's jump in. Alright, uh, first thing is I'm gonna click on the little  zoom option and say fit. Um, and scroll to the top. I'm gonna work on this first option.

Option A one. Actually it's one A, uh, the very first one we did. Okay, so what I'm gonna do is, the first thing you need  to know about text effects is  that they can't apply to all text. So this text here, okay, sitting on top  of this rectangle has text effects, okay? This text that's inside of a rectangle, so we started  with a rectangle, we added text inside  of it doesn't have effects. So if you did want this to happen,  what you'd end up doing is with a T tool click T.

Okay? You'd have a paragraph  and clicking off moving it there. Then separately you'd have an element  and you'd go get rid of photos, go down to shape, okay? And you'd make these two things separately. Okay? Can you see the text is flashing in there?

That kind of works what we wanna do up here. But if we wanted to add effects to this,  we'd have these two separate things. A text inside of a rectangle. They are separate. I'm gonna delete you and delete you. So we've got this one and  what I wanna do is have this kind of up the top.

I'm going to move this down the bottom. Okay. I want this to kind of appear on the background image. Now mine stands off pretty well. Yours is probably not. You've got a different brand.

Um, different font, different color,  and double click on mine and kind of move it around. So that is less good. Turn my rotation back to zero. Kind of get it up here. Is that worse? Yeah, it's getting a bit worse.

So text effects are really good for not just kind  of like styley effects but actually making things legible. Especially when there's text against  a kind of a modeled background. Let's click effects and you probably don't need  me to go through them all. Okay? A shadowed drop shadow. Um, the one thing I will mention is shadow and lift.

For me, they feel like they're kind of the same  but they're, I don't know, uh, they feel different. Um, I feel like this should be good  shadow and that should be called lift. So lift is, I dunno what I call a traditional drop shadow. Can you see that? Kind of like, you know the  yeah, the shadow, the drop shadow. But they call it lift.

Okay? And shadow is just, uh, it replicates the color  that's being used in the font, okay? And just makes another copy of it. Let's zoom in. Okay? This kind of helps it stand off.

The one thing about this is this is confusing. It's not once you get used to it. So what happens is if I click none,  we've got all these options here, okay? If I click on shadow, what happens is all the shadow options  open up underneath it  and push this down so they're all still here. You can switch to splice. You see now splice has kind  of come up and showing me my splice options go back to none.

So if you are kinda just going, uh, figuring it out  and going, oh, I wonder what this one done  and you feel like you might've lost something,  just go back to none, okay? And it will clear 'em all off and then you can start again  and go, all right, neon intensity. They all have their own options. I'm not gonna go through them all. The one things I do wanna  show you is some fonts do some weird stuff. This one here, what is this one called?

This one is called Oh yeah, GLIN. I'm  Sure there's a better way of pronouncing that,  but some of the effects in this one. Let's have a look at hollow dozen weird stuff. So if your font's doing some weird stuff,  it's probably not the effects problem, it's the font. It has some complexity  that this doesn't know what to do with. I'm gonna undo it.

I'm gonna go back to this top one here  and uh, let's go back Tom. Add shadow. Actually lift. You can see here, you can play around with like  how well it separates for itself from the background. All of these are just kind of like variations of it. Um, one of the ones  that are interesting is Neon will wash out your color.

So if you start with let's say black  and I click on neon, it kind of goes weird. So what you want to do is start with a nice color. Okay? So I'm gonna go to my colors, start with something vibrant  and then, or not that vibrant, um, and then go to my effects  and then hit that and you'll see it kind of, I don't know,  works better when you start with a color. Last thing I wanna show you in terms of I'll let you play  around with the effects is one, is this one here background. That is quite a useful one.

It's kind of doing the same thing but differently. This one here is a rectangle with text in it. This is a text box with a rectangle around the outside. They're actually quite different. Um, well they're not, they look the same. Okay?

But this one here kind of wraps around the text  and the cool thing about it is  that it changes depending on the size of the text. Whereas this one uh, is more of a frame, okay? And everything tries to fit within the rectangle anyway. Very similar. Okay, that's the only other one you might use. Is that background color  or often I'll end up just drawing a rectangle in the  background 'cause I want it to be a little bit wider  than it is tall.

I don't like the kind of like evenness around it. I like my text boxes is to often have a little bit  of extra space left and right. It's not really a rule. My rule. Okay, and this one here has roundness. I like to pull off.

Okay? And the color I'm going to adjust. So they all have their own kind of options in terms of like  what you might do in addition. Okay? Select them. Have a mess around with these.

They're pretty easy to work through. Roundness spreads are kind of a weird word,  but it's just like how far out from the text  and do you want it to be transparent or not? Ooh, fancy. You've all probably done it. You click on glitch. Ooh, do love a bit of glitching.

Probably the wrong color for it but you get the idea. That is text effects. Really good for getting text to pop off the background. Ooh, one last little hack before I go. I end up doing this a lot. So instead  of using the rectangle okay and try  and transparency, what I'll tend to do is turn it to none.

Grab my shape tool. Okay, so elements I'm gonna go  to shapes, rectangle and I'm going to, depending on  what sort of size you want it to be, end up doing this. So we're doing a similar sort of thing,  but I get to kind of decide like the height and the width. Okay, maybe it's like this pc, I want it to kind  of tidy in on the edges here. If you hold down option, key on a Mac, alt key on a PC  where you drag the corners, okay the sides,  it does both the left and the right  and say I want something like that. Remember the spread on the last one,  the height was exactly the same as the width of the box.

And then do something like this. I want you to be uh, black  and then I'm going to close it down. Play with transparency. This one here. How see through this it is,  and I find this is kind of a good way of cheating  and like without it being a real obvious design element,  the text to kind of separate  from the background quite easily. One last quick thing.

If you have got effects already  applied to something or it's come from a template,  just select on it, click on effects  and it should open up with the effects that are applied. Alright, that is it. Text effects in Canva.