PDF to Grayscale
Turn a colour PDF grey, or pure black-and-white, without touching the text — it stays selectable, searchable and sharp — 100% in your browser, no upload
Drop a PDF here or click to browse
🔒 Rendered entirely in your browser — your PDF is never uploaded.
Turn a colour PDF into clean grayscale
Drop in a colour PDF and this tool rewrites the colour instructions inside it rather than redrawing the pages, so the words stay words — selectable, searchable, and as sharp as they were — while every colour becomes its grey equivalent. That makes it ideal for saving colour ink when printing, or standardising mixed-colour scans before archiving. Pages that are photographs have no instructions to rewrite, so those are converted pixel by pixel and the tool says how many it had to treat that way. All of that is the Keep the text route, which is the default. If you would rather have every page redrawn as a flat picture, Re-draw every page is the second choice on the page: it renders each page as an image, which is certain to match the preview but leaves no selectable text and a much larger file, and it is there for pages whose effects the first route cannot reach. A luminance formula (0.299 red, 0.587 green, 0.114 blue) matches how the eye weighs brightness, so photos and coloured text keep their natural contrast instead of turning muddy. You can also switch on pure black-and-white mode, which turns text, lines and fills solid black or white at a threshold you choose. On Keep the text, photographs and scanned pages turn grey rather than black and white, or keep their colour if you leave them in colour; to snap every pixel to black or white for a fax-like page, choose Re-draw every page.
Private by design
Both routes run locally with pdf.js and pdf-lib, from start to finish inside your browser: the file is never uploaded to a server, and once the page has loaded the tool keeps working with no network at all.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between grayscale and black-and-white?
Grayscale keeps the full range of grey tones by setting each pixel to its brightness, so photos and shading still look natural. Pure black-and-white turns text, lines and fills solid black or white at a threshold you set — best for text, forms and line art rather than photos. On Keep the text, photographs and scanned pages turn grey (or keep their colour if you leave them in colour); only Re-draw every page snaps every pixel to black or white, for a fax-like page.
Will the text still be selectable?
Yes, on the default setting. "Keep the text" rewrites the colour instructions rather than redrawing anything, so every word stays selectable and searchable and the links and bookmarks keep working. The text layer is lost only if you deliberately pick the second option, "Re-draw every page", which renders each page as an image — that is the output you would need OCR for.
Is my PDF uploaded anywhere?
No. Whichever route you pick, all of it happens in your browser with pdf.js and pdf-lib, so your file never leaves your device and the tool keeps working offline once loaded.