Convert a PDF to black & white for cheaper printing. Note: pages are rasterized (text becomes an image).
Loads its engine on first use, so there's no offline download — but it still runs privately in your browser, nothing uploaded.
Drop a PDF here, or click to choose a file
Heads-up: output pages are rasterized — text will no longer be selectable or searchable.
About this tool
Convert a color PDF to grayscale to save color ink and toner, produce print-ready black-and-white handouts, or standardize mixed-color scans. Each page is rendered, desaturated using the standard luminance formula, and rebuilt into a new PDF at the original page dimensions.
Important tradeoff, stated plainly: the output pages are rasterized. Each page becomes a grayscale image, so text is no longer selectable or searchable and file size can change (often smaller for photo-heavy files, larger for pure-text files). If you need selectable text, keep the original alongside the grayscale copy. Choose a higher quality setting for sharper text at the cost of a bigger file.
The entire conversion runs in your browser — your document never leaves your device and nothing is uploaded to any server, so it's safe for private and confidential files.
Frequently asked questions
Will the text still be selectable in the grayscale PDF?
No — this is the tool's honest tradeoff. Pages are rendered to grayscale images and rebuilt into a PDF, so text becomes part of the image and is no longer selectable or searchable. Keep your original file for editing.
Why rasterize instead of converting colors directly?
True vector color conversion requires a full PostScript-grade engine that can't run privately in the browser. Rasterizing keeps the conversion 100% on your device — a deliberate privacy-first tradeoff.
Will the file get smaller?
Often yes for photo- and scan-heavy PDFs, since grayscale JPEG pages compress well. Pure text or vector PDFs can grow, because crisp vector instructions are replaced by page-size images.
Is my PDF uploaded for conversion?
No. Rendering, desaturation and rebuilding all happen locally in your browser tab — the file never leaves your device.