Grayscale PDF
Drop the color 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.
Before you start
- Printing in black and white anyway? Convert first to check that charts still read without color.
- Chain it with Compress PDF to make the file smaller still.
Good to know
- Accepts
- Files at once
- One at a time
- Transmission
- None — nothing is uploaded.
Chain it
Run Grayscale PDF → Compress PDF back to back — nothing to download in between.
How to do it
Add your file
Add the color PDF. This is usually about printing cost, a print shop’s requirement, or just a smaller file.
Set it up the way you want
There is nothing to set. The color instructions in the page are rewritten to their gray equivalents.
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 grays the pixels, which destroys the text layer: no search, no copy, nothing for a screen reader. Here only the color commands change; text stays text and vector stays vector.
- Will it look the same as printing in gray?
- 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 color document in gray. A more modern formula would look slightly different from what your printer does, and the same document would then appear two ways.
- Some color is still there.
- Those are colors set through an embedded color profile, where the instruction does not name its own color 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.