Editing the text in a JPG with Canva

Canva treats an uploaded JPG or PNG as one picture. You can crop it, filter it and put things on top of it, but the words in it are not text elements. Clicking on them selects the whole image.

Canva’s Grab Text (in the image editor, under Edit) detects text in an uploaded image, removes it and turns it into a Canva text box. It works best on flat designs with a plain background and a common font: a simple poster, a slide, a social graphic.

It struggles with photographs, textured backgrounds, perspective, outlines and shadows, handwriting and non-Latin scripts. In those cases the removal leaves a smudge and the new text box is set in a default font that does not resemble the original.

Cover the old text with a shape or a cutout, add a text box, and pick the closest font from Canva’s library. For a flat design this takes ten minutes and looks fine. For a photo of a sign, a chat screenshot, a meme caption with an outline or a handwritten note it is not really possible: the background is not a solid color and the font is not in any library.

A tool that rewrites the existing pixels rather than adding a layer. Make It Say finds each line, you type the new words, and the line is repainted in the same font, color, angle and effects, on the same background. Then bring the result back into Canva if you want to keep designing around it.

If the text is already part of the pixels and you only need to change the words, Make It Say does that in one step: upload, type the new text, download. The font, color and angle come from the image itself, so there is nothing to match by hand. First edit free.