Image Hue

What is hue rotation?

Hue rotation is a colour adjustment that shifts every pixel's hue around the colour wheel while preserving its lightness and saturation. A shift of 180 degrees maps red to cyan, green to magenta, and blue to yellow — effectively inverting the colour scheme without turning the image into a negative. Hue rotation is a powerful creative tool for recolouring photographs, creating colour-coordinated design assets, and exploring alternative colour palettes.

This tool runs entirely in your browser. When you upload an image, it is decoded through the Canvas API. As you drag the hue slider, the tool reads the raw pixel buffer, converts each pixel from RGB to HSL (hue, saturation, lightness), adds the shift to the hue channel, and converts back to RGB. The preview updates instantly, and the result can be downloaded as a PNG file. Nothing is ever uploaded to a server.

How hue shift works

The HSL colour model separates hue (the pure colour) from saturation (intensity) and lightness (brightness). This separation makes it possible to change the colour of an image without affecting its tonal structure. The conversion from RGB to HSL uses the standard max-min algorithm, and the reverse conversion uses the hue-to-RGB interpolation. Pure white, black and 50% grey have zero saturation, so their hue is undefined and they remain unaffected by the shift.

When to use hue adjustment

Hue adjustment is useful in design, photography and creative projects. Common use cases include:

Hue vs other colour adjustments

Hue adjustment is useful in design, photography and creative projects. Common use cases include:

• Colour scheme exploration. Quickly try different colour palettes on a single image to find the most harmonious look.
• Seasonal recolouring. Turn a summer landscape into autumn by shifting greens toward orange and red.
• Brand matching. Adjust the dominant colour of an image to align with brand guidelines.
• Special effects. Create alien landscapes, surreal scenes or sci-fi colour grading with extreme hue shifts.
• A/B testing visuals. Generate colour variants of the same image to test which performs best.

Whenever you need to change the colours of an image while keeping its structure intact, hue rotation is the most direct approach.

How to adjust hue

Adjusting hue with this tool takes only a few seconds and runs entirely in your browser — no uploads, no sign-up, no watermark. Follow these steps:

1. Upload your image. Click the upload area or drag and drop a JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF or BMP file.
2. Adjust the hue shift. Drag the slider from 0 to 360 degrees. 180 gives complementary colours, 120 gives triadic shifts. The preview updates in real time.
3. Download the result. Click "Download Hue Image" to save the hue-shifted PNG.

Because every step runs locally through JavaScript, your image is never sent to a server. This makes the tool completely private and fast.