Invert image colours — make a photo negative

How to use Image Invert

1. Choose one or more images.
2. Pick Save as (Same format as the original is the default) and the Quality for lossy formats.
3. Press Invert.
4. Download the files ending in -inverted.

There are no sliders: inversion is all or nothing.

What it does and when to use it

Inversion swaps light for dark and every colour for its complement. Good reasons to use it:

• Turning scanned black-and-white negatives into prints you can view and share.
• White-on-black versions of logos, signatures, line art and screenshots of text, for dark slides or dark-mode pages.
• Creative effects, such as an X-ray look or a surreal colour swap.
• Spotting flaws in a design: odd colours often stand out more on the negative.

If you only need to flip one colour value, such as a hex code from a brand guide, the Color Inverter does that without an image. For a black-and-white negative, you might first convert to grey with Image Grayscale to remove any colour tint from the scanner.

How it works

After decoding the file in a Web Worker, the tool runs a lookup table over every pixel: each of the red, green and blue values v becomes 255 − v. Alpha (transparency) is left alone. The result is saved by your browser’s encoder, and the image never leaves your device.

Worked examples

Values from the tool’s own lookup table.

A signature for a dark slide. A black signature on a white PNG becomes a white signature on black. To place it on a dark background without the black box, remove the background afterwards with the Background Remover.

Limits and tips

• Mid-grey barely changes (128 becomes 127), so low-contrast pictures look grey either way.
• Inverting a photo of a person gives unnatural skin tones; that is expected.
• The inverted copy does not keep EXIF details such as the date taken.
• Animated GIFs are read as a single frame.