Invert Image

Turn a picture into its negative — every colour reversed, at whatever strength you choose.

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What this tool does

Invert Image subtracts each colour channel from 255. At full strength a pixel at red 20, green 200, blue 90 comes back as 235, 55, 165; black becomes white, white becomes black, and every hue lands on its opposite. Only the three colour channels are touched, so the alpha channel passes through untouched and a PNG with a transparent background keeps that background transparent. Nothing is resized, cropped or moved, so the output has exactly the width and height it went in with.

The Strength slider runs from 1 to 100 per cent and blends the negative back towards the original, and the arithmetic behind it produces one result worth knowing about in advance. At 100 per cent you get a true negative. Below that, each channel moves only part of the way, which compresses the range towards the middle — and at exactly 50 per cent every pixel in the picture lands on mid-grey 128, whatever it started as, because that is where the blend crosses over. Useful settings therefore sit either side of the halfway mark, not on it: 70 to 90 per cent gives a softened reverse of the colours, while 10 to 30 per cent reads as a washed-out version of the original.

Output format is up to you — Same as the input, or JPG, PNG, WebP or AVIF — and the quality slider opens at 88 and reaches JPG, WebP and AVIF, PNG being lossless. Same as the input only holds for formats the canvas can write, so a GIF or a BMP is returned as a PNG. Choosing JPG matters more here than for most filters: JPG carries no alpha, so transparent areas are painted white before the inversion runs, which means they come out black at full strength and a flat grey below it. Load several files and each is inverted in turn on the same settings, arriving with -inverted added to the name in front of the extension.

Two honest limits. The inversion works on the stored sRGB byte values rather than on linear light, which is the normal and expected behaviour for a photo editor's invert command but is not a photometric negative — it will not match what a light meter would predict. And converting a scanned film negative back to a positive takes more than this: black-and-white film inverts cleanly, but colour negative film is exposed through an orange base mask, so reversing a scan of one gives a heavily cyan-blue image that still needs per-channel white balancing in a dedicated film tool. Metadata does not survive either, because the canvas hands back bare pixels with no EXIF, GPS or colour profile attached.

How to use it

  1. Add your pictures. The browser decodes JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF, BMP and SVG here, and AVIF if it is recent enough. Several at once is fine — each one is inverted separately on the same settings.
  2. Choose a strength. 100 per cent is a true negative. Lower values blend back towards the original, and 50 per cent flattens the whole picture to mid-grey, so step past it in either direction.
  3. Pick an output format. Leave it on Same as the input, or name JPG, PNG, WebP or AVIF yourself. Keep PNG or WebP when the source has transparency you want to survive the trip.
  4. Check the quality and download. The slider starts at 88 and applies to JPG, WebP and AVIF only. The result is named with a -inverted suffix and reports the strength that was applied.

Processing & privacy

Runs on your device. Your file is processed directly in this browser.

Common use cases

Recolouring a diagram for a dark slide

A chart or schematic drawn as black lines on white becomes white lines on black in one pass, which suits a dark deck or a dark-mode page far better than dropping the original onto it.

Reading faint detail in a dark frame

Astrophotography, microscopy and X-ray-style images hide thin structures in shadow. The eye separates dark lines on a light ground more easily, so a negative image often shows what the original does not.

Previewing a reverse-polarity design

Before committing artwork to white-on-black printing, reverse colours across the whole layout to see which strokes disappear and which type becomes too thin to hold.

Inverting a black-and-white film scan

A monochrome negative frame scanned as an image becomes a readable positive at 100 per cent strength, which is enough to see what is on a roll before deciding what to print.

Questions

Does the picture leave my computer?
No. Decoding, inverting and re-encoding all take place in this browser tab on a canvas, which is why the page carries on working with the network switched off. The file itself is never transmitted.
Does inverting twice give me the original back?
Yes for the pixel values — 255 minus 255 minus a value is that value again, so a second pass at 100 per cent restores every channel exactly. The only cost is the encode: two round trips through JPG, WebP or AVIF stack up two generations of compression loss, while PNG output costs nothing.
Why does 50 per cent strength produce a flat grey rectangle?
Because that is where the blend between the original and its negative meets. Each channel moves halfway towards 255 minus itself, and for every possible starting value that halfway point is 128. It is the maths behaving correctly rather than a fault, and it is the reason the slider is worth nudging away from the middle.
Can I turn a colour film negative into a proper positive?
Not reliably. Inverting reverses the channels, but colour negative film sits on an orange base mask that inverts to a strong blue cast, and correcting it needs per-channel black and white points chosen for that specific film stock. Black-and-white negatives have no mask and come out usable straight away.
What happens to transparency?
The alpha channel is left exactly as it was, so with PNG, WebP or AVIF output a transparent region stays transparent while the visible colours reverse. JPG is the exception: it has no alpha, so transparent pixels are filled with white first, and at full strength that white inverts to black.
Can I invert an animated GIF?
Only the first frame. The browser decodes a single frame, GIF is not among the output formats here, so an animated file comes back as one inverted still written as PNG, JPG, WebP or AVIF.
Why will it not open my HEIC or RAW photo?
No browser ships a decoder for HEIC, TIFF or camera RAW, so those files are refused with a message rather than a broken result. Run an iPhone photo through HEIC Converter first, or export the RAW as JPG or PNG, then invert that.

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