Invert Image Colors Online

Every pixel gets subtracted from 255

Your screen stores a pixel as three numbers from 0 to 255: red, green and blue. A photo negative replaces each number with its distance from the top of the scale.

R' = 255 - R
G' = 255 - G
B' = 255 - B

Take a sky pixel at rgb(135, 206, 235). The negative is rgb(120, 49, 20), a burnt orange. Black trades places with white, red with cyan, green with magenta, blue with yellow.

Those pairs come from light, not paint, so they differ from the art class wheel where red sits across from green. Load sample and point at the color row to watch each pair in the readout.

What six colors turn into

Read the bottom row first. Mid gray barely moves in either column, so a foggy, low-contrast photo stays dull after inversion. The skin tone row explains why portraits look strange as negatives, since faces land on a cold slate blue.

Pick the mode by the job

• Full negativePoster art, X-ray style graphics, and scans of black and white negatives, which carry no color base to correct.
• Lightness onlyDark versions of charts, diagrams and screenshots. Black text on white flips to white text on black, and a blue link stays blue. In a stylesheet, filter: invert(1) hue-rotate(180deg) gets close to this result.
• Single channelsColor shifts for album art and glitch work. Flip blue alone and white turns yellow while black turns blue.
• ThresholdSolarized prints. Flipping the brighter pixels mimics a darkroom print re-exposed during development. Expect a hard edge along the cut-off.
• Film negativePhone or scanner captures of color negatives, covered next.

Scanned film needs more than a flip

Color negative film has an orange base. A plain negative turns that orange into a heavy blue cast. Film negative mode inverts first, then stretches red, green and blue across the full range one at a time, which clears most of the cast.

1. Lay the strip on a white screen or light pad and shoot straight down.
2. Trim the film border and sprocket holes with the image cropper. Leftover border skews the levels.
3. Drop the cropped frame here and choose Film negative.
4. Fix any leftover tint with color balance.

Treat the result as a proof. The math knows nothing about your film stock, so skin tones often drift. Use dedicated scanning software for prints or archives.

Where this tool stops

• One image at a time, with no batch queue.
• Animated GIFs lose their motion. Only the first frame gets inverted.
• Files up to 60 MB load. Saves stop at 50 megapixels, and larger images scale down to fit.
• RAW files load in no browser. HEIC needs Safari. Export those as JPG or PNG first.
• Output is 8 bits per channel, so 16-bit scans lose tonal steps.
• Camera data such as EXIF and GPS does not carry into the saved file. Wide-gamut photos convert to sRGB, so the richest colors lose some punch.
• Have a single hex code instead of a picture? Use the color inversion calculator.