How to Invert a Picture on Mac with Preview

Want to quickly invert a picture on the Mac? You can use the excellent bundled Preview application to invert any image, there is no need for any powerful or expensive photo editing tools. Just as it sounds, inverting a picture will take the colors of that image and reverse them to their opposite, so blues become yellows, whites become blacks, and so on.

Inverting the colors of an image with Preview on the Mac is done by basically reversing the white point and black point, dragging each to their opposite sides of the color adjustment slider. Therefore you drag the white point all the way to the left, and the black point all the way to the right, and the color is effectively inverted for that image.

How to Invert Image Colors on Mac with Preview

Here are the exact steps to invert an images color in Preview for Mac:

1. Open the picture or image file you want to invert in the Preview app on Mac



2. Pull down the “Tools” menu and choose “Adjust Color”



3. Drag the ‘White Point’ slider all the way to the left, reversing its position
4. Drag the ‘Black Point’ slider all the way to the right, reversing its position



5. Save the image when satisfied with the color inversion

If you’re having problems with this because the sliders hide behind one another, it can be helpful to drag the white point or black point to about the 1/4 way mark and then drag the other to the opposite side, making it easier to see and drag the little sliders.

That’s really all there is to it.

Of course you can make other color adjustments as desired, but our purposes here are to invert an images color and not do any other editing or adjustments. And yes this works if you have also used Preview to convert a picture to black and white, to increase color saturation, to resize the image, or perform any of the other color and image adjustment features of the app.

Preview is an excellent image application with a ton of capabilities, and despite being bundled with every version of Mac OS it remains an often overlooked app. You can check out more Preview app tips for Mac here.

Note this about inverting the images of a specific picture or image file, this is not about using the Accessibility shortcut to invert the Mac screen completely which is a general feature of Mac OS.