Image Inverter
Invert colours like a film negative, or invert brightness while keeping the hue.
Turn a Photo Into Its Negative
Colour inversion replaces every channel with 255 minus itself. That single operation is what a film negative is, and it is genuinely useful beyond the novelty — inverting a dark screenshot makes it printable, and inverting a scanned negative recovers the positive image.
This tool does the straightforward version and a more interesting one: inverting brightness while holding the colour ratios. That keeps skin, sky and foliage recognisable instead of turning everything into the familiar orange-and-cyan of a true negative.
Key features
- True colour inversion — the exact film-negative transform, applied per channel.
- Luminance-only mode — flips light and dark while keeping hue, which is far more useful for documents and screenshots.
- Adjustable strength — blend between the original and the inverted version at any point.
- Instant preview with compare — toggle the original back on to see exactly what changed.
- Lossless PNG export — no recompression artefacts introduced by the tool.
This tool runs entirely inside your browser using native Web APIs. Your files and text are never uploaded to a server, never logged and never shared with third parties.
How to use: Image Inverter
- Drop in an image
Any format your browser can display — JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF or AVIF. - Pick the mode
Full inversion for a negative, or brightness-only if you want the colours to stay recognisable. - Adjust the strength
Pull it back from 100% for a partial effect, which can be a useful stylistic result in itself. - Download the PNG
Save the inverted copy. Inverting it again returns the original exactly.
Technical specifications
| Processing location | Entirely in your browser — no server round trip |
|---|---|
| Data uploaded | None. Files and text never leave your device |
| Price | Free — no account, no trial, no usage cap |
| Category | Media |
| Works offline | Yes, once the page has loaded |
| Browser support | Chrome 90+, Edge 90+, Firefox 90+, Safari 15+ |
| Interface languages | English, 中文, हिन्दी, Español, العربية |
Frequently asked questions
Can I recover a scanned film negative with this?
Partly. Inverting gives you the positive, but colour negative film has an orange base layer that also needs removing, so the result will look cyan. Inverting is the first step, not the whole job.
Is inverting reversible?
At full strength, yes — the transform is its own inverse, so running the output through again reproduces the original exactly.
Why does brightness-only mode look better on photos?
Because it keeps the relationships between channels intact. A face stays a face-coloured shape rather than becoming blue, which makes the result readable where a true negative is not.
Does it handle transparency?
Yes. The alpha channel is left alone, so transparent areas stay transparent in the exported PNG.