Looking at a bright, glowing white screen all day can cause severe eye strain, especially if you are working in a dimly lit room late at night. While macOS has a built-in “Dark Mode,” not every application or website respects that setting. Some older apps and webpages will still blast a blinding white background directly into your eyes.
If you need absolute darkness to read comfortably, or if you suffer from specific visual impairments, you can force macOS to mathematically invert every single color on your screen, instantly turning blinding white backgrounds into soothing, deep blacks.
How to Turn on Smart Invert
Apple offers a highly intelligent feature called “Smart Invert.” This feature reverses the colors of the user interface (turning white menus black), but it is smart enough to leave images, videos, and icons in their original, natural colors so they don’t look like terrifying photo negatives.
- Click the Apple Logo in the top-left corner of the screen.
- Select System Settings (or System Preferences).
- Scroll down the left-hand sidebar and click on Accessibility.
- In the main window under the “Vision” section, click on Display.
- Toggle the switch next to Smart Invert to the ON position.
Your screen will instantly snap to a dark theme. If you open a webpage with a white background, it will render as black, but the photographs on the page will still look perfectly normal.
How to Turn on Classic Invert
If you need maximum contrast and don’t care about how images look, you can use the older “Classic Invert” method. This is a brute-force approach that literally reverses every single pixel on the display. (Blues turn orange, greens turn magenta, whites turn black).
- Follow the exact same steps above to navigate to System Settings > Accessibility > Display.
- Toggle the switch next to Classic Invert.
How to Create a Fast Keyboard Shortcut
If you only need to invert your colors occasionally (like when a specific app is too bright), digging through the System Settings menu every time is annoying. You can create a fast shortcut to toggle it on and off instantly.
- Go back to the main Accessibility menu in System Settings.
- Scroll all the way down to the bottom and click on Shortcut.
- Check the box next to Invert Display Colors.
Now, whenever you want to instantly invert your screen, you can rapidly press the Touch ID button three times in a row (or press Option + Command + F5 on older Macs) to bring up the Accessibility Shortcut menu and flip your colors immediately.