How color inversion works
A digital image stores each pixel as three numbers from 0 to 255: red, green and blue. Inverting means replacing each number with 255 minus itself. A pure white pixel (255, 255, 255) becomes pure black (0, 0, 0), a mid gray stays almost the same, and every color turns into its complement on the color wheel:
| Original | Inverted |
|---|---|
| Black | White |
| Red | Cyan |
| Green | Magenta |
| Blue | Yellow |
| Skin tones | Blue-green tones |
This is the “negative” effect people know from old film strips and from the invert option of photo editors. Because the operation is exact, inverting the downloaded PNG a second time gives you back the original pixels.
Brightness only: invert light and dark, keep the colors
The second mode answers a different need. Instead of flipping each channel, it measures how bright the pixel is (its luminance, weighted the way the eye perceives red, green and blue) and shifts all three channels by the same amount so that the brightness is mirrored. Light backgrounds become dark, dark text becomes light, but a red logo stays red and a green leaf stays green.
That is useful to turn a white screenshot or a diagram into a dark version, to make a scanned page easier to read at night, or to create a moody, high-contrast version of a photo without the alien colors of a full negative. Very saturated colors can hit the 0 or 255 limit and get slightly flattened, so this mode is not perfectly reversible.
Formats and batch processing
You can open JPG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, GIF (first frame), BMP and SVG files, plus iPhone HEIC photos. You can add several images at once: the preview shows the first one, and Download saves them all in a single ZIP file, each with “-invert” added to its name (a file whose format changes, such as HEIC to JPG, just gets the new extension).
| You open | You download |
|---|---|
| JPG | JPG (quality 92%) |
| PNG | PNG, transparency kept |
| WebP | WebP (PNG in Safari, which can’t save WebP) |
| HEIC, AVIF | JPG |
| SVG, GIF, BMP | PNG |
Ideas and related tools
- Pure black and white negative: convert the photo with Black and White Photo first, then invert it for a clean monochrome negative.
- Graphic poster look: invert, then reduce the result to a few flat tones with Posterize Image.
- Change just one color: if you only want to swap a single color rather than all of them, use Change Image Color, and Image Color Picker to read the exact value of a color before and after.
Privacy
There is no upload step. The page reads your file, inverts the pixels on a canvas and saves the result locally; the site’s security policy only lets the page talk to its own server. The output is rebuilt from pixels, so EXIF metadata such as GPS location and camera model is not copied into the new file.