Free Convert PDF to Grayscale
Convert any PDF to black & white — perfect for printing or accessibility. No upload, instant result.
Converting a PDF to grayscale removes all colour information, replacing it with shades of grey. Useful when printing on a black-and-white printer to avoid colour ink charges, when preparing documents for greyscale-only workflows, or when archiving in a standardised format. This tool renders each page via pdf.js and applies a greyscale transformation using the Canvas API.
Click to select or drag & drop your PDF here
Each page is rendered as grayscale image. Works on all PDFs including scanned documents.
Greyscale PDFs are often required for printing on monochrome laser printers, for accessibility audits of non-colour presentations, for archiving where colour is not needed, or for sharing draft documents where colour is distracting. The conversion re-renders each page as a greyscale image, which also means the output PDF is always compatible with all PDF viewers regardless of their colour support.
How it works
Select PDF
Click or drag & drop. Stays on your device.
Set options
Choose settings — browser processes locally.
Download
Instant download. Free, no account.
Why Convert a PDF to Grayscale?
Converting to grayscale is useful when printing on black-and-white printers to avoid colour ink wastage, when a printer or copy shop requires black-and-white documents, or when converting for accessibility or archiving. Grayscale PDFs are also typically smaller in file size than their colour equivalents.
This tool renders each PDF page using pdf.js, applies a grayscale transformation using the Canvas API, and compiles the result back into a PDF using pdf-lib — entirely in your browser. Works on text-based and scanned PDFs alike.
This Conversion Rasterises Your Pages — Read Before Using
Converting a PDF to greyscale sounds like it should simply change a colour setting. In practice, there is no document-wide colour switch in the PDF format: colour is specified independently by every text run, vector path and image on every page. Changing all of them in place would mean rewriting each content stream.
This tool takes the pragmatic route instead. Each page is rendered to a canvas with pdf.js, every pixel is converted using the Rec. 601 luma weights (29.9% red, 58.7% green, 11.4% blue — the standard perceptual weighting, which is why a yellow and a blue of equal brightness do not become the same grey), and the result is embedded back as a JPEG image at high quality.
You should know what that costs, because it is significant. The output pages are images. Text is no longer text: it cannot be selected, copied, searched or read by a screen reader, and any hyperlinks, form fields and bookmarks are gone. The file also frequently grows rather than shrinks, since a full-page photographic image usually outweighs the vector text it replaced. Use this when you need a visually greyscale document — a print proof, a fax-style copy, a submission that must not contain colour. If you only want to print in black and white, your printer's own greyscale setting does that without touching the file.