Every control, what it does, and why it behaves the way it does. Nothing here is a secret — if a thing is confusing, that is worth knowing, so tell us.
Everything EasyFade does comes down to editing the alpha channel — the invisible fourth channel in an image that says how see-through each pixel is. Most "fades" you find elsewhere are a white gradient laid on top of a photo. They look right on a white page and fall apart the moment you move them onto a colour, a pattern, or another photo, because the white was never transparency. It was paint.
EasyFade removes the pixels instead. The result is genuinely see-through, so it sits on anything. That is the whole product, and the rest is different answers to one question: where does the fade start?
Save as PNG. JPEG cannot store transparency at all and will fill your fade with white — the single most common thing that goes wrong.
In the Canva app, open EasyFade and choose Fade one photo. On the website, this is the editor on the front page. Either way you get three modes, and you use one at a time, because combining them makes mud.
The straightforward one, and it is free with nothing held back: all four sides, full resolution, no watermark, no limit on how many photos.
Tick any combination of Top, Right, Bottom and Left. Each ticked side fades inward. Turn on two adjoining sides and the corner between them comes out more transparent than either one alone — that happens naturally, because the two removals multiply, and it is the physically correct answer rather than a special case anybody wrote.
How far it fades sets how deep into the photo the fade reaches, as a percentage of that side. 100% would take the fade all the way across.
This is not a rotated edge fade, and the difference matters. An edge fade always spans a whole side. A line is local: a short stroke in one corner touches that corner and leaves the rest of the photo alone.
You get a stroke across the preview with a handle at each end. Drag the middle to move the whole thing. Drag either end to set its length and its angle in one gesture — there is no separate rotate control because the ends already say which way it runs.
One side and The other side set how far the fade reaches on each side of the stroke, and they are separate on purpose. Take one to zero and you get a hard edge on that side and a soft fade on the other, which is how you make a photo look torn rather than blurred. There is no "one-sided" tick box because the sliders already say it.
The fade tapers past the ends rather than stopping dead, so a short stroke blends into the photo instead of looking like a cut.
Circle, oval, square, triangle, star, hexagon and heart. Drag the shape around on the photo, and use Size and Rotation below. Size goes past 100%, which is useful when you have pushed the shape half off the frame.
Shape is deliberately the odd one out. Every other mode starts the transparency at the thing you place. Shape keeps what is inside it. A shape is a container, not a source — "make my photo a star" is what people want from a shape picker, and cutting a star-shaped hole is the rarer move. Consistency would have cost the common case.
There is no separate "circle" or "radial" mode. A point fade is a circular one, so it is Shape with the circle picked — placeable, resizable and rotatable like the rest.
One tick box, and what it means depends on the mode you are in, which is why the note under it changes:
Inverting a shape is how you put a heart-shaped hole in a photo and let a background show through it.
Softness is not the same as how far the fade reaches. Low softness holds the image solid and then drops away quickly. High softness starts dissolving immediately and takes a long gentle ramp to nothing. Same distance, very different feel.
Curve — Smooth, Extra smooth, Linear, Ease out, Ease in, Exponential — changes the shape of that ramp. Smooth is a good default and Linear is the most mechanical.
If you have ever seen a fade with faint stripes running across it, that is banding, and it comes from a gradient described with too few steps. EasyFade places its gradient stops at equal steps of alpha rather than equal steps of distance, which bounds the error below what 8-bit colour can even represent. That is a long way of saying: no stripes, at any setting.
This one lives in the Canva app only for now; the website editor is single-photo. It combines two to five photos into one image, meeting along faded seams rather than hard edges. Two photos is free. Three or more is Pro.
Open EasyFade and choose Fade photos together. Then:
Click them one at a time. Each click drops a photo into the next empty slot, which is outlined so you can see where the next one is going. Click, click, click.
Shift-clicking several at once also works and fills several slots in one go, but you do not need to know that — it is a shortcut, not the way in.
Clicking a photo that is already in a slot does nothing. That is deliberate: it is far more often a stray double click than a request to use the same photo twice. If you genuinely want one photo in two places, use the + under it.
Clicking around your design once every slot is full also does nothing, so you can go looking at other things without disturbing what you have set up.
The numbered boxes under the arrangement. Numbers label regions, not photos — slot 1 is always the same part of the arrangement, so the numbers never move around. Under each filled slot:
An empty slot can be a solid colour instead of a photo — the colour button under it opens Canva's own picker, so your brand colours are already there. One solid panel among four photographs reads as deliberate design rather than as a collage.
Drag it on the preview. Whichever panel you grab is the photo that moves, and a Zoom slider appears for it.
Here is the thing worth understanding: a photo can only move through the part of it that overflows its panel. Every photo is fitted to cover its panel, and whatever hangs off the sides is your room to move. A photo whose shape happens to match its panel has no overflow at all, and dragging it will do nothing. Zoom in first and there will be something to move.
This is the same bargain as any photo frame: if the picture is exactly the size of the frame, you have to make it bigger before you can slide it around.
Arrow keys do the same thing, one small step at a time, ten times bigger with shift held.
How far the photos bleed into each other where they meet. Low keeps each photo in its own panel with a crisp join; high dissolves them into one another.
The number is a fraction of a panel, not of the whole picture. That matters: it means 30% looks like roughly the same amount of blending whether you have two photos or five. At 0% you get hard edges — a collage. At 100% the transition is as wide as the narrowest panel, which is genuinely dissolved.
Softness and Curve work here too, and mean the same thing they do on a single photo: a seam between two photos is a falloff like any other.
Default, Square, 4:3, 3:4, 16:9, 9:16. Every button is an aspect ratio; Default is the shape it would come out anyway, which is the shape of your first photo.
The arrangement re-flows to suit rather than stretching, so a pinwheel in a tall frame is still a pinwheel with taller wedges. Nothing gets squashed.
Choosing a frame does not cost you resolution. The frame decides the shape; your photo still decides the detail.
Wedges meeting at a point in the middle, available for three, four and five photos.
It is there because straight splits cannot make it. A split is a full line across the frame, so splits alone can give you four triangles at most and never five. Wedges radiate from a centre, which is a different kind of cut — and it is still only gradients underneath, so the seams fade exactly like every other seam.
The blend is added as a new image. Your original photos stay exactly where they were, untouched. Nothing is replaced and nothing is deleted, so there is nothing to undo if you do not like the result — just delete the new image.
This is not a stylistic choice. Canva's API does not let an app remove elements from a design, so five photos cannot become one photo. Given that, adding is the honest behaviour: nothing disappears without you asking.
Every Pro control is free to try. Switch on a shape, drag a line, set up a five-photo blend — it all works, live, on your own photos, and the preview shows exactly what you would get. Paying is only what lets you apply the result. Nothing is hidden behind the price except the save, because a demo that will not show you the thing is not much of a demo.
Free, with nothing held back: fading any or all four edges, at full resolution, with no watermark and no limit on how many photos. Blending two photos into one.
Pro, $6 a month or $55 a year: the Line and Shape modes, Invert, and blending three to five photos.
One subscription covers both. If you subscribe from inside Canva, the app links your Canva account to your subscription automatically, and Pro is on next time you open it.
On the website, sign in with the email you paid with and we send you a link. There are no passwords anywhere in EasyFade.
In the Canva app, the footer says which plan you are on and links to Manage EasyFade subscription. On the website it is under Settings → Manage billing.
Cancelling is two clicks and we never ask why. Pro keeps working until the end of the period you have already paid for. We do not give refunds, which is fair precisely because every Pro control is free to try before you pay.
They are never uploaded. Not on the free tier, not on Pro, not ever.
Every fade is calculated in your own browser, on your own machine. On the website the file never leaves your computer. In Canva, the app reads the image from Canva, fades it in the page, and hands it straight back to Canva — it does not pass through an EasyFade server, because there is no server in that path to pass through.
The only thing our server is ever asked is whether your subscription is active. The full version is in the privacy policy.
Almost always JPEG. It cannot store transparency, so anything see-through gets filled with white when the file is written. Save as PNG.
If you are placing the image in another tool, check that tool is not flattening onto a white background on export.
Turn the Blend slider down. It controls how far photos bleed past their own panel, and at high settings that is exactly what they are meant to do.
That photo has no overflow — its shape already matches its panel. Zoom in on it and there will be room to move. See Moving a photo inside its panel above.
Canva gives the app the original asset rather than the version on your page, so a flip or crop you did in Canva does not travel with it. The ↻ and ⇄ ⇅ buttons under each slot put it back.
Big images take a few seconds because the work is happening on your machine rather than on a server. If it never finishes, try a browser tab with less going on, or email us the file size and what device you are on.
In Canva, close the panel and open it again — it re-checks whenever it regains focus. There is also an Already subscribed? Check again button on the upgrade screen.
On the website, sign in with the email you paid with. If nothing arrives, check spam, then email us and we will sort it by hand.
Tell us what you were doing, what you expected, and what happened instead. A screenshot helps enormously. We would much rather hear about it than not — several things on this page exist because somebody wrote in.