Grayscale PDF
Drop the colour to shrink the file and cut printing cost.
- Zero-transmission processing
- No watermark
- Limited daily trial
- Unlimited on Pro
Drop your PDFs here
or pick them from your device
Your files are never transmitted. Nothing is uploaded.
Good to know
- Accepts
- Files at once
- One at a time
- Transmission
- None — nothing is uploaded.
Chain it
Run this tool and the next one back to back — nothing to download in between.
How to do it
- 1
Add your file
Add the colour PDF. This is usually about printing cost, a print shop’s requirement, or just a smaller file.
- 2
Set it up the way you want
There is nothing to set. The colour instructions in the page are rewritten to their grey equivalents.
- 3
Download the result
Download the result. The text is still text — searchable, selectable and readable by a screen reader.
Questions about Grayscale PDF
- Is the document turned into pictures?
- No, and that is the whole design. The easy way to build this tool draws every page onto a canvas and greys the pixels, which destroys the text layer: no search, no copy, nothing for a screen reader. Here only the colour commands change; text stays text and vector stays vector.
- Will it look the same as printing in grey?
- Yes, deliberately. The conversion uses the PDF specification’s own formula, 0.3 red plus 0.59 green plus 0.11 blue — exactly what a reader applies when it prints a colour document in grey. A more modern formula would look slightly different from what your printer does, and the same document would then appear two ways.
- Some colour is still there.
- Those are colours set through an embedded colour profile, where the instruction does not name its own colour space. Guessing at them can invert a page, so they are left untouched and counted instead. The count tells you how much was left, which is more useful than a document that quietly came out wrong.