Hello everyone. In this video I'm going to talk about the two applications I use on desktop to create awesome images for Instagram. Okay, the first one I want to talk about is canva.com, which I use to create images for myself. I also used to create designs for clients and it's a free application. After you sign up you will have an interface like this. And here you can select to create a design.

And here you have the first six options. And if you click here more, you will have more so if you want to do popular designs, social media posts, documents, ebooks, marketing materials, email Heather's events at Facebook and banners, everything so it's really really cool this one it has if you want to do infographics, you can do it here too. Now we are interested in making Instagram posts. So here I will select Instagram posts and as you can see it's 1080 by 1080. We'll click on it, a new window pops up. And here is your canvas.

Right in the middle. On the left side you have the options menu, you can search for images, so you put in your dog and it will come up all dog pictures and illustrations with dogs. And as you can see a few of them are free. And most of them it's really cheap. It's $1 it's really nothing. And you have great images here.

Or as I showed you, what you can do is go to one of the free stock photo sites like pixels or pixabay. Take the image from there and upload it here and then you can use it. So you can upload it here, you just click Upload your images and you import it here. Now what options do you have here on the left layouts, you can choose layouts here Canva layout. Here are a few one off for free. They're actually a lot for free.

This is paid. You can see they have a watermark on it. Okay, then you can click on the test, you can edit the text. You can edit the title, you can change the color up here in this bar, right here you can add to be bold. You can add to be centered left or right spacing you can do that to the line height. You can copy it if you want to do it again and just move it around, arrange, you can do the transparency.

And you can delete, you can click on another element, it will show up here, you can select here. The first option is you have a lot of fun fonts here to choose from. And then choose and put in your text. And you can make it bigger. The second option is basically the size like this, and you can move it around. It's really easy.

It's really cool. Let me show you what I did here. So basically, this is the hacks I didn't do here, but I did a ebook here. So let me go back to this page and all of your design. So let me show you actually this ebook. If you downloaded it.

I have 51 tips on growing on Instagram, and I did it here in Canva. So this is pretty awesome. As you can see I can move around the the elements here the text, I put my logo in here uploaded the logo, the text I choose here, the fonts and this is how I did it and I just duplicated the pages change that. And this is where I created this ebook, which is really cool. And also here I create some of the posts for the companies I work for. So this one I really truly recommend it's totally free.

It will save your designs so you don't have to all the time create a new one it will save your designs. It will save your designs with the EZ left them. So if I click to go out here, I believe it it will show up here in all your designs So you can see, it saved it as it was, even though I left it like this. So this one is the first one I recommend. It's really awesome, easy to learn, anybody can do it, you don't have to be a designer. The second one I use is Pablo.

Now here are the options are limited, but lately I've been creating a lot of posts with this one. So on the left side here, you can search for images. And I think source also searches pixabay. So if I put in here dark. Yeah, a lot of dog images show up actually comes from unsplash unsplash.com. Okay.

So this one, it shows images from unsplash. But you have maybe from pixel, yeah, they have from pixabay as well. So you select the image or you can upload your own image Image really depends on you. In the middle you have the canvas. And on the right hand side on the top, you will have text. You can add three type of text, you can add a header, you can add a body and you can add a caption.

You can move all these three around. As you click them, and hold them, you can move it, move them around, you can put here a nice tight or then the body and maybe a caption somewhere down. And as you click you will have a few. It's not in like Canva you will have like limited fonts. I don't know maybe 20 you have here have the option of going bold or italic. Then you have three sizes.

You can align it in the center left, right and you have the colors and you're limited on the colors as well. So it's not that sophisticated as Canva but for me for now, it does the work, I can work really fast and create really nice images. So usually what I do is use only the body one, I use the body, the biggest size, I can get maybe bold, and I choose here the font and then I add my text like this. I choose the color and I move it maybe in the middle. Okay, the next one is you can add coats. So if you don't have any ideas here, you can add quotes, just click this one and as you can see, you will have some quotes here from famous people gone.

Alice Walker, Rosa, Eleanor Roosevelt, Mary Oliver, and so on. And you can change the style if you don't like it, so it's really easy. Actually, there are a few more options up in the top You can do a Pinterest type of image which is this format, you can do the Instagram style the the square or you can do Facebook and Twitter which looks like this. So you select the Instagram one then you can you have some filters you have with no filters looks like this then you have like light contrast and the contrast, blur. grayscale the red team, Blue Team Green Team totally depends on you. Now what you can see is compared to Canva.

This has limited options, but for me, it's really doing the job. Then you can add your logo. This is my logo, you can replace it you can upload an image from your files. You can make it bigger or smaller right here and you can change the radius to be square or cut the edges. So these are the options After you're done with creating, just hit share and download, and you can send it to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, or you can buffer them to post it later with the buffer app, or you can download. So you just hit download, and it will appear in your downloads.

You can send it to your phone, and then post it. So these are the two ones I use. Lately, I've been using only Pablo, because it's really easy. I don't have a lot of options. So I don't spend time on like this should look better, or playing around with the brightness and contrast and all kinds of fonts because these are limited. And this really helps me because I get the work done faster.

So that's about it. Thank you for listening. If you have other suggestions, let me know in the comments. And Let's move on to the next lecture. Thanks