PaintStudio

Invert image colors

Turn any picture into its negative: black becomes white, blue becomes yellow and every color flips to its opposite. The effect is applied as soon as your image opens.

Drop an image here

or paste it from the clipboard · PNG, JPG, WebP, HEIC, PSD…

How it works

  1. Drop your image — its colors are inverted immediately.
  2. Fine-tune with Levels… if you are working with a scanned negative.
  3. Click Export and download the result.

What inverting does

Invert replaces every color with its opposite and every brightness with its mirror value: white turns black, light gray turns dark gray, red becomes cyan and yellow becomes blue. Applying it a second time gives back the original exactly. Transparent areas stay transparent, so a logo on a transparent background keeps its shape. To invert only part of an image, click Undo, select the area and apply Invert from the Filters panel — handy for highlighting one region of a diagram.

Scanned film negatives

If you photographed or scanned a film negative, inverting is the first step to a positive picture. Black-and-white negatives often look good straight away; Levels… then sets the black and white points to bring back contrast. Color negatives have an orange base, so after inverting the photo looks blue. Open Levels… and adjust the red, green and blue channels separately until neutral areas look gray, then fine-tune with Temperature and Tint in the Adjust panel. There are no film-specific profiles, so expect some manual tweaking.

Screenshots, diagrams and creative uses

Inverting a dark-mode screenshot gives a light version that prints better and fits into documents, and a white document becomes a dark one for a presentation. Colors flip too, so a blue link turns yellow; dragging the Hue shift slider in the Adjust panel can bring hues closer to the originals while keeping the inverted brightness. As an effect, invert gives photos an X-ray look, especially combined with the Grayscale filter.

Frequently asked questions

How do I invert only part of an image?

Click Undo to remove the full inversion, select the area with Rectangle select, Lasso or Magic wand, then click Invert in the Filters panel. Only the selection changes; the rest of the image stays as it was.

Can I invert colors in a transparent PNG?

Yes. Invert changes only the colors, not the transparency, so the transparent background stays transparent. Export as PNG or WebP to keep it; JPEG would fill the transparent areas with white.

How do I undo an inverted image?

Click Undo or press Ctrl/⌘+Z. You can also simply apply Invert a second time: inverting twice returns exactly the original colors, because the operation is fully reversible.

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