When you’re not a designer, everything can easily sound complicated. For me, that complication came down to not having an easy-to-use tool to help me get hands-on experience and practice. Well, once again, Canva is here to save the day, and provides the perfect solution for your color tinting problems.
What is a Tint?
A color tint is a base color plus white in order to produce a color that is lighter than the original. Similarly, a shade is a base color plus black to produce a darker shade.
How to Create a Color Tint
Knowing that, and armed with a free tool like Canva, the rest is easy. I’ll provide a few different ways to go about this depending on your project, starting with the following steps:
1. Pick a Color
First, which color tint do you want or need? Red, blue, green? It can be anything.
2. Create a White Canvas
Now, create a white canvas. You’ll want this to be your working Canvas, so depending on what you need to create using your tint, you’ll want to be able to do so with Canva. This includes creating something from scratch with Canva’s elements, uploading your own photos, etc.
For the sake of the example, we are going to stick with a plain white canvas, but I’ll also go through an example with elements and photos as we move along.
3. Add Your Color of Choice
Now, you’ll want to add the color you want to tint. Again, this will depend on your creation, but for now I’ll add a green rectangle.
4. Adjust Transparency
Last, all you need to do is adjust the transparency of the, in this case, green rectangle. To do so, select the rectangle, then click the three dots in the top menu bar. In the dropdown that follows, click the faded checkerboard icon to access the transparency. Then slide the adjuster to achieve your desired tint.
With the above, you’ve easily created a tint by layering this transparent green over the white background. By placing an object halfway under the transparent piece, you can see the effect in action:
As mentioned above, you can also go about this differently by uploading or selecting a photo from Canva’s elements.
In this example, I selected this baseball pitcher. Here is the original photo for reference:
By following the steps above, I can create a color tint—here is an example with different color tints covering different sections of the photo.
Alternatively, you can also select the photo and then click “edit image.” Then, click it says “see all” next to the adjustments, and locate the “tint” slider. Here, you can slide the adjustment to which ever color you please.
If you’re not achieving the tint effect you desire, you can also adjust other sliders like saturation, etc. Here is an example:
