How to use it
- Add images.
- Each is inverted immediately.
- Download.
What inverting does
Each colour channel is flipped: a red value of 255 becomes 0, 200 becomes 55, and so on for green and blue. Transparency is left alone, so a transparent logo stays transparent. Running an image through twice gets you back to where you started.
Handy uses
- Dark screenshots in light documents. A dark-mode screenshot of code or a chart can be inverted to sit comfortably on a white page. Colours in the image will shift to their opposites, so check that highlights still make sense.
- Scanned film negatives. Inverting a scanned black-and-white negative gives a usable positive. Colour negatives also have an orange base layer, so they will need colour correction afterwards in a proper editor.
- Checking your work. Designers sometimes invert a layout to spot alignment problems, since the unfamiliar view breaks the eye's habits.
Inverting is not the same as dark mode
App dark modes swap light backgrounds for dark ones while keeping colours recognisable. A straight inversion is cruder: it turns a white page black, but it also turns red to cyan, skin tones to an eerie blue and photos into negatives. For pages that are mostly black text on white, the result is close to a dark mode. For anything colourful, it will look strange. Converting to greyscale first and then inverting gives a cleaner light-on-dark version of a colourful chart or diagram.
Questions people ask
Will inverting a colour negative give me a proper photo?
It gets you most of the way. Colour film has an orange mask that inverts to blue, so a colour correction step is needed afterwards.
Does inverting affect transparency?
No. Only colour is inverted; transparent areas stay transparent.
Can I invert only part of an image?
Not with this tool. It inverts the whole picture.