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Invert

Turns the picture into its negative: dark becomes light, light becomes dark, and every colour becomes its opposite. Transparent areas stay transparent. Invert has no controls.

Group: Color & Tone · How to add an effect

The harbour town on the coast, original left and with Invert right, like a photo negative: the blue sky turns orange, the white clouds dark grey, the turquoise sea a rusty red and the bright house fronts pale blue and grey, while the dark rocks and shadows turn light
Left: original. Right: Invert.

Use it for: a photo-negative or X-ray look · a flash frame on a hit in the music · a dark stage turned into a bright, ghostly one.

Tip: for light and dark swapped but colours roughly as they were, put Hue Shift at 180° (the Half Turn preset) after Invert. Skin and warm light come back close to their own colour; strong colours land within about 20° of where they were.

Controls

Section titled “Controls”

Properties, Effects with an Invert card that has no rows, only its title bar with the switch to turn it off and on, beside a strip of the preview with the harbour town as a negative, its sky orange and its houses pale blue

Invert has no controls. 1 — Switch: turns Invert off and on, to compare with the original.

Invert has no controls and no presets: a negative is either on or off, so the card shows “No parameters”. The switch in its title bar (1 in the picture) turns Invert off and on without removing it, to compare with the original. For a flash on a beat, split the clip and add Invert only to the short piece, or put it on an adjustment layer above just those frames.

Node setup

Section titled “Node setup”

The Invert graph: Input Frame, Image to RGBA and Split Vector take the picture apart into R, G, B and A; a Value card at 1, the White Level, and R, G and B go into the Invert RGB folder, which puts out Inverted R, G and B; the Alpha & Image folder takes those three and the untouched A, and Output follows

Invert opened in the Nodes tab. 1 — White Level: the 1 every channel is taken away from. 2 — Invert RGB: one Subtract per colour channel. 3 — Alpha & Image: the inverted colour and the untouched transparency back into one picture.

Image to RGBA and Split Vector take the picture apart into its red, green, blue and alpha channels, each from 0 to 1. The White Level, a Value card at 1, goes into Invert RGB together with R, G and B; Alpha & Image puts the result back together with the untouched A. Click a folder’s header to open it; the sections below show what is inside.

Invert RGB

Section titled “Invert RGB”

Inside the Invert RGB folder, the red channel: the White Level and R come in as stubs on the left, and a Subtract card takes the White Level as A and R as B and puts out Inverted R; G and B have a Subtract of their own, the same

Inside Invert RGB, the red channel (G and B look the same). 1 — Subtract: White Level minus the channel.

Subtract – takes each colour channel away from the White Level: 1 − R, 1 − G, 1 − B. Black (0) becomes white (1), white becomes black, and a middle grey (0.5) stays where it is. A colour turns into its opposite, because every channel that was strong becomes weak: orange (much red, little blue) turns into a light blue. The folder has three of these cards, one per channel; only the channel differs.

Remix: select the Value card (the White Level) and set it to 0.8. The negative gets darker, and everything that was brighter than 0.8 before turns black instead of dark. At 1.2 the negative gets lighter and the deep shadows of the original burn out to white.

Alpha & Image

Section titled “Alpha & Image”

Inside the Alpha & Image folder: Inverted R, G and B and the original A come in as stubs; Combine Vector joins the four, and RGBA to Image turns them back into a picture

Inside Alpha & Image. 1 — Combine Vector: the three inverted channels and the original alpha together. 2 — RGBA to Image: back into a picture.

Combine Vector – joins Inverted R, G and B with the original A, which comes straight from Split Vector. That is why a transparent area stays transparent instead of turning into a white one.

RGBA to Image – turns the four numbers back into the picture that goes to Output.

This folder has no Clamp: 1 − x of a value between 0 and 1 stays between 0 and 1. With a White Level other than 1 (the Remix above), values below 0 or above 1 are cut off when the frame is stored.

Technical details

Section titled “Technical details”
  • Formula. Per channel 1 − x on the screen colours (sRGB, not linear light), alpha untouched. Applied twice, Invert gives back the original exactly.
  • Transparency. Effects work on straight (not premultiplied) colour, so a half-transparent edge keeps its alpha and gets the inverted colour.
  • Adjustment layers. On an adjustment layer Invert turns everything below it into a negative.
  • Folder names. A saved graph that already has its folders keeps them (an older one: Color Processing and Clamp & Alpha); only the names differ, the picture is the same. A newly added Invert opens with the folders above, and a graph you had already edited keeps its own.
  • What all colour effects share (8-bit range, saved projects, adjustment layers): Color & Tone; blocks: Node Catalog.