There are plenty of free color tools on the internet but over the last few years Canva has also created a few handy color tools. If you’re already designing in Canva, then Canva’s color tools can be used right alongside your Canva template, making it quick and easy to experiment with new color combinations for a planner sticker set, printables collection or other design.

In this post I’m sharing a video tutorial of how to use them, my favorite color tools (and one of Canva’s color tools that I don’t recommend).

The best color tools in Canva

To enlarge the screen of the video, click the square icon in the bottom right hand corner of the video (it will say ‘full screen’ when you hover your mouse over the icon).

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1. Canva Color Palettes

The Canva Color Palettes tool is one of my favorites. It has thousands of color palettes to explore with options for:

Pastel color combinations
Bright color combinations
Different shades of the same color
Multi-colored palettes

This tool is great if you’re trying to pair colors together and find yourself always gravitating towards the same color combinations. E.g. I would never have thought of the first color palette but I quite like it for a planner sticker set.

There are 99 pages of different color palettes so you’re bound to find a few you like. You can also search for specific color palettes based on a theme, then mix and match different shades for the various palettes to create your own palette.

Tip: you can use the snipping tool on your computer to take a screenshot of an entire page of the color palettes. You can then copy and paste this into Canva and quickly mix and match colors from different palettes. I showed how to do this in the video above.

When you click on a color palette, you’ll be taken to a new page where you can see a larger preview of the swatches, as well as the image / inspiration that the colors came from. If you’re trying to choose colors for products for your online shop such as planner sticker sets, the popularity of the color palette is shown beside the heart icon on the top right of the image.

If you like the colors in the palette you can hover over the swatch, click the copy button that will appear, then go to your template in Canva and paste the color code to start using it.

2. Canva Color Wheel

If you’re never read up on color theory there’s a good summary of information on this page: Canva Color Wheel.

Also on that page linked above, is a color wheel tool. The color wheel tool can be used to find 2, 3 and 4 color combinations with complementary, monochromatic and analogous combinations too.

Canva’s color wheel tool tool is good when you know what colors you want to pair together, but maybe you aren’t sure what tones / shades of those colors you want to use.

3. Elements Menu (Photos & Color Swatches)

Within the elements menu of Canva there are so many stock photos you could extract colors from. Depending what sort of colors you’re looking for, some things you could search to find color inspiration are:

Nature e.g. flowers
Sunsets
Something that might already have a theme e.g. ‘birthday party’
Patterns
Rainbow
Food

You can extract the colors yourself using the dropper tool, otherwise Canva will give you suggested colors they’ve extracted for you.

The colors you might extract using the dropper tool could create a different palette to Canva’s suggested extracted colors.

Patterns are some of my favorite ways to find color inspiration, plus then there’s already a ready-made pattern I can pair those colors with. A color combination like this would look great as a planner sticker set.

Also within the elements menu, you can search ‘color swatches’ and plenty of layout options for your swatches will appear. These templates make it easy to create a swatch chart if you offer different color combinations (pre-selected by you) in your products. Or if your customers get to choose what colors they want for your product, you can show them some popular color combinations that past customers have ordered.

Some of Canva’s pre-made color swatch templates. You can replace the color with your own color palettes

4. Canva Color Palette Generator

I only recommend using the Canva Color Palette Generator if you have professional stock photos that you want to extract colors from. I haven’t had very good results when using this tool with my own unedited photos, it produces really dark swatches that don’t match the colors used in the photo very well at all.

I would never use these colors that Canva’s color palette generator picked out from this photo I took!

There are plenty of stock photos already within Canva in the elements menu which you can extract colors from. I don’t think Canva’s color palette generator tool is necessary.

Instead, I’d use Design Seeds for inspiration. They already extract the colors out of the stock photos for you, and you can quickly browse hundreds of color palettes.

Otherwise just copy and paste the image you want to pull colors from straight into Canva, and use the eyedropper tool within Canva to extract colors and make your own color palette.