Make a black & white or mirror image photo

These are two of the simplest photo edits there are, but they solve genuinely different problems — grayscale conversion is usually about matching a form's requirement or a printer's output, while mirroring fixes a photo that's backwards because of how it was captured, not because it needs a stylistic effect.

Converting to black & white

Some ID and exam forms specifically ask for a black-and-white, photocopy-style photo rather than a colour one, and printing on a monochrome printer often looks cleaner when the source image is already grayscale rather than relying on the printer to convert it on the fly. The Black & White tool removes colour information while preserving brightness, so shadows and highlights stay exactly where they were in the original — a true grayscale conversion, not a sepia-tint filter.

Flipping a mirror image

The most common reason to flip a photo horizontally: front-camera selfies are mirrored by default on many phones, so the photo you see doesn't match how you actually look to someone facing you — a quick flip corrects this. The second common case is a signature or a page of text photographed through glass or in an actual mirror, which comes out reading backwards; flipping the photo restores the correct reading direction. Use the Mirror Image tool for either case.

A quick way to tell if you need a flip

If any text, numbers, or a watch face in the photo reads backwards, that photo needs a horizontal flip. After flipping, real text should read normally left-to-right — a fast visual check before saving or submitting the image anywhere it matters.

Doing both at once

If you need to both flip and grayscale the same photo, the full Photo Editor supports combining edits in one session rather than downloading and re-uploading between the two dedicated tools.

Combining both effects, and when mirroring changes visible text

Black-and-white and mirror are independent edits, so applying both to the same photo — say, for a stylised print or a specific design need — simply means running the photo through one tool and then feeding that result into the other, since neither edit affects the other's outcome. The one case worth watching is a mirrored photo that contains visible text, a printed sign, or a watermark, since flipping the image reverses the text along with everything else, which is usually undesirable unless the mirroring is being done specifically for a design or print process (like certain t-shirt or decal printing methods) that expects a reversed image.

For an ordinary portrait or ID-style photo with no text in frame, mirroring is purely cosmetic and doesn't affect anything else about how the photo will be used.