Turn a Photo into a Negative
Convert a picture into its negative — or recover the real image from a scanned film negative — with a live preview and full control over contrast and warmth. Nothing is uploaded.
Privacy-first: every image is processed locally in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, stored or transmitted to any server.
From scanned negative to viewable photo
If you have scanned or photographed a strip of old film, what you have is a negative: dark where the scene was bright, and tinted by the film base. Setting the invert slider to 100% flips it into a positive so you can finally see the picture. That first flip is rarely the finished job, though — film scans usually come out low in contrast and with a color cast left over from the film base.
The rest of the controls are there for exactly that. Auto levels stretches each color channel back across the full range, which removes most of the cast in one click. Then contrast adds the punch a flat scan is missing, and the warmth slider corrects whatever tint remains — cooler for a scan that came out too orange, warmer for one that came out too blue.
Making a negative from a normal photo
The same control works in the other direction. Invert a normal photograph and you get the negative version: an eerie, high-contrast image that is useful for artwork, for a striking poster treatment, or for producing a mask or stencil where the light and dark areas need to swap places. Combine it with black & white first to get a classic monochrome negative with no color complements at all.
Nothing is destructive. The original file on your disk is untouched, the preview updates as you drag, and holding the compare button shows you the before at any moment.
Private by construction
Family negatives and old film scans are exactly the kind of images that should not be handed to an anonymous web service. Every step here happens inside your browser tab on your own hardware, with no upload, no account and no watermark — and it keeps working with the network off once the page has loaded.
Frequently asked questions
- Is my image uploaded to adjust it?
- No. Every adjustment is computed on a canvas inside your browser, so the photo never leaves your device and no server ever sees it.
- How do I make an image black and white?
- Set the “Black & white” slider to 100% — or click the B&W look, which also adds a little contrast so the result does not look flat. Noir goes further with a much harder contrast curve.
- What does inverting the colors do?
- It replaces every color with its opposite, which turns a photo into a negative: white becomes black, blue becomes orange. It is how you read a scanned film negative, and a quick way to flip a screenshot to a dark version.
- What is the difference between brightness and contrast?
- Brightness moves every tone up or down together, so the whole picture gets lighter or darker. Contrast pushes light and dark tones apart, which adds punch — or, in the negative direction, flattens the image into a soft, hazy look.
- What does Auto levels do?
- It measures each color channel of your photo, ignores the extreme 0.4% at each end, and stretches what is left across the full range. Washed-out, hazy or underexposed shots usually snap back to life with a single click.
- Can I adjust many photos at once?
- Yes. Drop in as many images as you like — the settings apply to all of them, and you can download the results individually or together as a single ZIP.
- Will adjusting reduce quality?
- The adjustment itself works at full resolution with no downscaling. Only the re-encode matters: choose PNG for a lossless result, or keep JPG/WebP at a high quality setting.