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How To Create a Mirror Effect in Canva

Here’s how to make awesome mirror effects in Canva.

Are you looking to create your own mirror effect designs but not sure how?

In this article, we’ll take you through the exact steps you can take to create a mirror text effect in Canva, and a mirror image effect too. It’s super easy.

Let’s get to it.


Jump to a specific section:

Option 1: How to mirror text in Canva:

  1. Create your text element
  2. Download it as a PNG
  3. Import it back into Canva
  4. Adjust and ‘flip’
  5. Change transparency and blur

Option 2: How to mirror an image in Canva:

  1. Choose or upload an image
  2. Crop it to fit half the canvas
  3. Copy, adjust, and ‘flip’
  4. Change brightness or blur

Option 3: Combining both together


How to mirror text in Canva

Open a new blank canvas design in Canva, we recommend making it a decent size canvas (e.g. 2000x2000px) so the text elements can be quite big.

Step 1: Create your text element

Now that you have a blank canvas open, navigate to the ‘Text’ tab on the left side panel and click to add a text box or another text element to your canvas:

Adding a text element

Then input the word or words that you want to create the mirror effect with, and choose the font type for the text element:

Adjusting the font

Step 2: Download it as a PNG

The next step is to download the text as a PNG image with a transparent background:

Downloading the text element

If you want to download designs with a transparent background in Canva, you’ll need a Canva Pro account. Otherwise you can download it with a fully opaque background and then remove the background using a free tool such as Kapwing or Remove.bg.

Related article:

Step 3: Import it back into Canva

Now that you have the text design as PNG image with a transparent background, simply upload that file into your account, you can simply drag the file onto the browser tab with Canva opened and it will appear in your ‘Uploads’ tab:

Downloading the text element

Step 4: Adjust and ‘flip’

Add the uploaded file to your canvas and then crop the image so the border around the image is similar to the border around the original text element.

You can crop the image by dragging the line toggles or you can also click the ‘Crop’ option on the top panel above the canvas:

Cropping the image

Then using the circle toggles around the image, resize it to make it the same size as the original text element.

You can use the guidelines that appear on the canvas to see when your elements line up with each other:

Cropping the image

Once they are lined up and the text looks to be the same size as the original text element, make sure you have the image element selected, go to the ‘Flip’ via the top panel and select ‘Flip vertical’:

Flipping the image

Step 5: Change transparency and blur

To make the mirror effect look even better, you can change the transparency of the image by clicking on the image element and accessing the transparency option at the right of the top panel:

Changing the transparency

You can also add a slight blur effect if you think it enhances the mirror effect. To do that select the image element, click on ‘Edit image’ > click ‘See all’ next to ‘Adjust’ and then alter the blur option:

Adjusting the blur effect

And that’s it. That’s how you can create a mirror text effect in Canva.

Here’s how our final mirror text effect looks:

Mirror text effect

Example of text mirror effect on an image

There are plenty of use cases for the text mirror effect. One simple example is to use over an image. Here’s an example of that in action:

Mirror text effect in action

How to mirror an image in Canva

You can create a similar effect with images in Canva too. Here’s how:

Step 1: Choose or upload an image

Open another blank canvas in your preferred dimensions, and either upload and add your own image to the canvas or navigate to the ‘Photos’ tab on the left side panel and search for an add a suitable image.

In our example, we’re going to use an image of a tree:

Finding a suitable image

Step 2: Crop it to fit half the canvas

With your chosen image added to the canvas, we now need to crop it to get it cover exactly half of the canvas.

To do this you can click on the image, go to ‘Crop’ on the top panel and do it that way. Or you can use the line toggle and drag until you see that is only covering half the canvas. The guidelines will appear to show you that:

Cropping to fit half canvas

Step 3: Copy, adjust, and ‘flip’

Now we need copy the image by either by right clicking on it and selecting copy, or by pressing CMD/Ctrl + C with your keyboard:

Downloading the text element

Then paste a copy of the image (right click + click paste or CMD/Ctrl + V). After that, we can rotate the newly pasted image 180 degrees so it’s upside down, you can use the rotate toggle to do this:

Rotating the image

To get the perfect mirror effect we need to do one that last thing, and that is to flip the image horizontally.

Click on the second image, go to ‘Flip’ on the top panel, and click ‘Flip horizontal’:

Flipping the image

Step 4: Change the brightness and blur

You can test out some of the image adjustments such as brightness and blur to see if that will improve the mirror effect of your design:

Making adjustments

And that’s it. Here’s are final mirror image effect:

Mirror image effect

Combining both together

You can obviously combine both effects, a mirror text and image to create even more unique designs and images.

Playing around with the adjustments, particularly the blur and brightness, can help you create some great effects.

Here’s are our final combination of the mirror text and image effects:

Mirror text and image effect combo

Related articles

Wrapping things up

So, there you have it, that’s how you can quickly, and easily create mirror effects using Canva. Whether you want to create the effect with text or images, both are very easy to do.

We hope this guide helped you out!

Enjoy creating! If you have any questions or suggestions please leave a comment below.

Written by Sam McCraw

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