About Hue Rotate
Hue Rotate shifts every colour in an image around the colour wheel by the angle you choose. Upload a picture, set a number of degrees, and the whole frame comes back with each hue moved by that amount - ninety degrees is filled in to start with, and a hundred and eighty produces the complement of every colour in the picture.
The change is applied through the browser's own image filter, the same one behind the CSS filter property, so the colour handling is the platform's rather than a hand-written matrix. That matters for two reasons: the rotation is done at full image resolution in a single pass, and it is a true hue rotation, which means saturation and brightness are left alone while only the position on the wheel changes.
The work happens on a canvas in the page. The degrees are clamped to the range nought to three hundred and sixty, so a negative figure or a value beyond a full turn is pulled back in rather than wrapped around, and the result is delivered as a PNG at the original pixel dimensions with a preview to check before you download.
How to use Hue Rotate
- 1 Choose an image file from your device.
- 2 Set the rotation in degrees between 0 and 360; 90 is filled in to start with.
- 3 Watch the preview update, and adjust the angle until the effect is what you wanted.
- 4 Download the result, which is always a PNG at the original size.
Frequently asked questions
Can I change the hue of just one object in the picture?
No. The rotation is applied to the entire frame in one pass, so there is no brush, no selection and no tolerance to limit the change to one colour range. If only part of the image needs adjusting, the change has to be made in an editor with a mask and this page used for a reference value.
What is the difference between this and a colour balance control?
A colour balance control moves individual channels and can leave some colours alone. This rotates every hue by the same amount on the wheel, which is a single global change: a red shifts to yellow at ninety degrees and to green at one hundred and twenty, and every other colour moves with it by the same step.
Why is the downloaded file a PNG?
The output format is fixed. The image is redrawn onto a canvas and saved as PNG, so whatever you uploaded comes back as a PNG at the same width and height - the original compression is not carried over, and a large photograph will therefore produce a larger file than it started as.
Does a full turn of 360 degrees change anything?
In principle it returns each hue to where it started, since a complete rotation ends on the same position it began. In practice the image is redrawn through the canvas on the way out, so the pixels are re-encoded and the file is not byte-identical to the one you uploaded.
Free, online, and private
Free to use
Hue Rotate is completely free. There is no account to create, no login, and no hidden charge or usage limit.
Runs online in your browser
It is a free online tool that runs entirely in your browser. Nothing to download or install — open the page and start using it right away.
Your data stays private
All processing happens locally on your device. Your input is never uploaded, stored, or tracked, so it never leaves your browser.
How Hue Rotate behaves in detail
These are the specifics of this implementation — the exact ranges, defaults and fixed settings you are working with.
| Parameter | Value |
|---|---|
| Input | a file picker plus one degree field defaulting to 90, declared from 0 to 360 |
| Range enforcement | the degrees are clamped again inside the run function, so a value outside 0 to 360 is pulled back into range |
| Mechanism | the canvas filter string is set to hue-rotate(Ndeg) and the image is drawn through it - the colour matrix is not written in this file |
| Coverage | the whole frame in one pass, with no brush, no mask and no region selection |
| Output format | always PNG at the original pixel dimensions |
| Exposure | the output is produced through the browser's own filter implementation, which can shift some colours non-uniformly near the extremes |
Compiled from the implementation of this tool and checked against it by itoolnet.
What Hue Rotate does not do
Knowing the edges of a tool saves more time than another list of its features. These are the cases where it will not do what you might expect.
- It is a rotation, not a selective adjustment. Every pixel in the frame moves by the same angle while its saturation and lightness stay put, so an object that needs its own hue corrected cannot be isolated - there is no picker, no eyedropper and no tolerance to restrict the change to part of the image.
- Saturation and lightness are deliberately untouched. The filter moves hue only, so a washed-out result cannot be rescued here: fixed at the source, a dull image stays dull, and a 180-degree turn produces the complement rather than a corrected version of the original.
- The result is flattened into PNG. The pixels are re-encoded on the way out, so the source compression is replaced and the file that comes back is always a PNG whatever went in - recolouring the original later means working from the file you started with rather than from the output.
Tested and documented by itoolnet, the team that builds and maintains this site.