If you have sensitive eyes, suffer from visual impairments, or simply need to read an article late at night without blinding yourself, the standard brightness controls on an iPhone sometimes aren’t enough. While Apple’s built-in “Dark Mode” does a fantastic job of dimming the overall interface, it only works if the specific app or website you are viewing supports it. If you stumble onto a web page with a glaring white background, Dark Mode won’t save you.
To solve this, Apple includes a powerful accessibility feature called “Invert Colors.” As the name suggests, this feature forcefully flips the color palette of your entire screen, turning stark white backgrounds to pure black, and black text to white. It is the ultimate brute-force method for reducing eye strain.
This guide explains how to enable the two different types of color inversion on your iPhone.
Smart Invert vs. Classic Invert
Before you turn the feature on, you need to understand the difference between the two available options:
- Classic Invert: This flips the color of absolutely every pixel on the screen. It is highly effective for reading text, but it will cause photos, videos, and app icons to look like highly distorted, neon photographic negatives.
- Smart Invert: This is generally the better option. It flips the colors of the user interface, backgrounds, and text, but it uses artificial intelligence to recognize images, media, and apps that already use dark color styles, leaving them in their original, correct colors.
How to Turn on Invert Colors
Both settings are located deep within the iPhone’s Accessibility menu.
- Open the Settings app on your iPhone.
- Scroll down the main list and tap on Accessibility.
- Under the “Vision” section at the very top, tap on Display & Text Size.
- Scroll down to the middle of the screen. You will see toggle switches for both Smart Invert and Classic Invert.
- Tap the toggle switch for the version you prefer to turn it ON (green). The screen colors will instantly flip.
How to Add an Accessibility Shortcut
Navigating through three layers of settings menus every time you want to read in the dark is tedious. Instead, you can map the Invert Colors feature to your iPhone’s physical side button for instant access.
- Go back to the main Accessibility menu in the Settings app.
- Scroll all the way down to the very bottom and tap Accessibility Shortcut.
- A list of features will appear. Tap Smart Invert (or Classic Invert) so a blue checkmark appears next to it.
- Now, exit the Settings app.
Whenever you need to quickly invert your screen, simply triple-click the physical side power button (or the Home button on older iPhones) in rapid succession. The screen will instantly invert. Triple-click the button again to return to normal colors.