What is a hue shift?

Hue is the position of a color on the color wheel: red, then orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue, magenta, and back to red. A hue shift turns every color around the wheel by the same angle. At 120° red becomes green, green becomes blue, and blue becomes red. At 180° every color turns into its opposite. Gray, black, and white have no hue, so they stay as they are.

Tool description

Open an image and drag the Hue shift slider, or type an angle in degrees. Positive angles turn the colors one way around the wheel, negative angles the other way. The preview updates as you drag, and the compare button shows the original next to the edit. Download the full size result as PNG, JPG, or WebP.

Features

  • Turns every color by the same angle, while grays stay gray
  • Keeps the lightness and saturation of each color
  • Live preview with a before and after comparison, processed in your browser

How it works

The tool reads each pixel as hue, saturation, and lightness (HSL), adds the angle to the hue, and turns the result back into red, green, and blue. Each pixel keeps its brightest and darkest channel values. Only the channel in between and the order of the three change. HSL lightness isn't quite the brightness the eye sees, so a deep blue that turns yellow looks brighter, and a yellow that turns blue looks darker.

Tips

  • Recolor icons, logos, and flat illustrations: a graphic in one color gets a new color with its shading intact.
  • Small angles change the mood of greenery: a few degrees below zero make it yellower, a few above zero make it bluer.
  • Transparent areas stay transparent. Download as PNG or WebP to keep them.