Change Image Color
Change image color by turning every hue around the color wheel, while white, gray and black stay as they are. Works on photos and video, free, nothing uploaded.
What does changing an image's hue do?
Hue is what we name a color by: red, yellow, green, blue and everything between. Arrange the hues in a circle and they run from red through yellow, green, cyan, blue and magenta back to red. That's the color wheel Isaac Newton first drew in Opticks in 1704.
A hue shift turns every color the same number of degrees around that wheel. Neutral tones have no hue, so white, grays and black stay put while everything else changes. A product shot on a white background keeps its white background.
How is the hue shift computed?
Each pixel's red, green and blue values are a point in a cube, and that point gets rotated around the cube's diagonal from black to white, the gray axis. Paul Haeberli laid out this method in 1993 in Matrix Operations for Image Processing.
At exactly 120 degrees the rotation turns into a channel swap. Reds go green, greens go blue and blues go red. That's the Hue shift preset this page opens on, and -120 runs the swap in the other direction.
The rotation keeps the sum of the three channels, and that sum isn't the brightness we perceive. So a red turned green comes out lighter, because green counts the most toward perceived brightness. Haeberli's paper also gives a version that holds luminance steady, but this tool uses the plain rotation.
How to change the color of a picture
Load an image or video and drag Hue anywhere from -180 to 180 degrees. Saturation below 0 drains color toward gray, reaching black and white at -1, and above 0 it strengthens the color. Brightness, Contrast and Gamma adjust the tones.
Mosh rolls a new random look. It's a quick way to see colorways you wouldn't have thought of.
Settings for product colorways, autumn to spring and a complementary palette
To turn a red product blue, use Hue -120, which sends red to blue, green to red and blue to green. For a red product to green, use Hue 120 with Brightness -0.1. The rotation keeps the channel sum, green looks brighter than red at the same sum, and dropping the exposure a little brings it back to the original's weight.
For autumn to spring, Hue 60 to 75 turns orange leaves yellow-green to green. Check any skin or wood in the frame, because it turns with them. For a complementary palette, Hue 180 moves every color to the opposite side of the wheel and keeps light parts light. Invert Colors is different there, since it also swaps dark and light.
Write down the Hue value of each colorway. The same angle gives the same result on every photo of a product, so you can recolor a whole set of shots to match. For a web shop, PNG or WebP keeps a clean edge against white, where a JPG can leave a faint colored halo around a saturated product.
Why did the whole picture change color, not just the shirt?
Hue turns every color by the same angle, and there's no mask or color picker to limit it. It only works as a one-object recolor when that object is the only colored thing in the frame, like a red bag on a white table or a blue logo on gray.
Skin, wood and sky all have a hue too, so in a busy photo they'll turn along with everything else.
Can I add color to a black and white photo?
Not with Hue. A gray pixel sits right on the axis the colors turn around, so there's nothing to turn. Every gray from black to white, run through Hue 30, 90, 120 and 180, came out unchanged down to the last level. Near-neutrals barely move either: a charcoal sweater at #2b2b30 became #302b2b at Hue 120.
To tint a black and white photo, map its brightness to colors. Duotone Generator gives the shadows one color and the highlights another. Gradient Map runs the tones through up to 16 colors, say dark blue shadows, warm midtones and pale yellow highlights. Neither one knows where a face or the sky is, so a face and a sky of the same brightness get the same color.
How do I change the color of a black logo or icon?
Open it in Duotone Generator, set Shadow to the new color and Highlight to white. Black maps exactly onto Shadow, so a black icon becomes, for example, #d62828 red. On a transparent PNG the see-through background and half-transparent edges keep their transparency. If you want to turn a black logo white, Invert Colors does it in one step.
A logo that already has a color belongs on this page. A #1e88e5 blue icon turns orange, #e97f22, at Hue 180, and lime, #88e51e, at -120. Save logos as PNG, which keeps the transparent parts, since JPG has no transparency.