Grayscale PDF
Convert a color PDF to grayscale or pure black and white for cheaper printing.
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PDF, DOCX, images, spreadsheets or text files.
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Convert a color PDF to grayscale or pure black and white for cheaper printing.
Fine-tune
Optional — sensible defaults are already set.
About Grayscale PDF
Grayscale PDF converts a color document to shades of gray or pure black and white, for cheaper printing or a uniform look. It works by rendering each page as an image and applying the filter, so the output looks right everywhere, but the text is no longer selectable or searchable.
When it helps
- Saving color ink when printing reports, slides or tickets
- Meeting submission rules that require grayscale documents
- Turning a faint color scan into crisp black and white text
Tips
- Pure black and white with the threshold slider is ideal for text scans. Raise the threshold if faint text disappears, and lower it if gray background speckles show up.
- 150 DPI is fine for on-screen reading and basic printing. Use 200 to 300 DPI for small print. Higher DPI means larger files.
- Keep the original. Once pages are images, you can't copy text, search, or click links in the grayscale copy.
Good to know
Quick answers about grayscale pdf in your browser.
Each page is redrawn as an image so the color change is guaranteed to apply to everything. Images don't carry a text layer, and there's no OCR step to add one back.
It depends. Vector text PDFs often get bigger because they become images. Photo-heavy or scanned PDFs can get smaller, especially with JPEG at a moderate DPI.
Yes. There is no sign-up, no watermark and no limit on how many files you process.
No. Files are read and processed locally in your browser, so they never leave your device.
Pages are re-drawn as images, so text is no longer selectable or searchable.
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Part of the More PDF Tools collection.