What it does
Flips colors to their opposites, like a photo negative. Invert everything, just the brightness, or individual channels.
A digital image stores each pixel as red, green, and blue values, and inversion subtracts each from its maximum. That single operation explains every familiar negative: light and dark trade places, and every hue swaps for its complement across the color wheel, which is why skies go orange and skin goes blue-green.
The interesting inversions are the partial ones. Luminance inversion flips light and dark but leaves hue alone, so a face stays skin-toned while the image reads as a negative, an effect photography cannot produce chemically. Channel inversion flips just red, green, or blue and shoves the whole image into surreal complementary territory. Threshold inversion flips only the tones above or below a chosen brightness, which is the digital descendant of solarization, the darkroom accident Man Ray turned into a signature.
Inversion is also a workhorse: it turns scanned film negatives positive, makes light-mode graphics readable on dark backgrounds, and, blended at partial strength, hollows an image into a low-contrast ghost of itself. As a live effect it can be animated, flickering between positive and negative or sweeping the solarization threshold through the frame.
Signature looks
Full negative
The classic: every value flipped, film-negative logic applied to anything. Instantly legible and instantly strange.
Bright-world negative
Luminance flipped, hues kept. Shadows glow, highlights sink, but the colors stay true, an inversion that never existed on film.
Solarized
Only the highlights flip past the threshold, edging portraits and skies with the metallic Man Ray look.
Try it on your own footage
This effect runs live in the Modulate editor, free with no signup — or start from the free tool page for a guided setup.
Common questions
What happens when you invert the colors of an image?
Each pixel’s red, green, and blue values are subtracted from their maximum, so brightness reverses and every hue becomes its complement: white turns black, red turns cyan, green turns magenta, blue turns yellow. The result is the digital equivalent of a photographic negative.
Can I invert brightness without changing the colors?
Yes, with luminance inversion: light and dark swap while each pixel keeps its hue, so a red shirt stays red inside a negative-looking image. It is a purely digital effect with no chemical-photography equivalent, and it reads as uncanny in a way full inversion does not.
What is solarization?
Solarization is the partial reversal of tones, originally a darkroom accident where re-exposing a print mid-development flipped its brightest areas. Digitally it is threshold inversion: only tones above or below a chosen brightness invert, producing the metallic, edge-lined look Man Ray made famous.
Why do inverted photos of people look blue?
Skin tones are warm oranges and reds, and inversion replaces every hue with its complement, which for orange is blue-cyan. The same swap sends blue skies toward orange and green foliage toward magenta, which is why full negatives have such a consistent palette.
How do I invert a video?
The operation is per-pixel, so it applies to every frame the same way. In Modulate the Invert effect runs live on images and video in the editor, with full RGB, luminance, per-channel, and threshold modes, and the amount can be animated for flicker and sweep effects.
Related effects
Gradient map
Recolors the image by mapping its dark and light areas onto a gradient you design.
Threshold effect
Reduces the image to two colors with a hard cutoff between light and dark, with optional outlined edges.
Hue shift
Rotates every color around the color wheel, and can keep the colors cycling over time.