How to make a PDF black and white
- Drop your PDF on the box. Black and white is already ticked on this page.
- Choose a quality preset. Recommended suits screen reading and email; Print quality keeps fine details for printing.
- Press Compress PDF, check the before and after sizes, and download the grayscale file.
Why convert a PDF to grayscale?
Many official forms, court filings and university submissions ask for black-and-white documents. Grayscale PDFs also print without using colour ink, which matters for long documents and shared office printers, and they are often much smaller than colour scans, so they fit through email attachment and upload limits more easily.
Each page is rendered and converted using the standard luminance formula (30% red, 59% green, 11% blue), which keeps the perceived brightness of colours so that charts and highlighted text remain readable. Because pages are converted to images, text in the result is no longer selectable or searchable; keep your original if you need that, or run the result through OCR.
Like every PDF tool on this site, it runs entirely in your browser: the file is read from your device, processed locally and saved back to your device. Nothing is uploaded, there is no account, no watermark and no daily limit.
FAQ
Will the text still be searchable?
No. Pages become grayscale images. Keep the original PDF for searching, or use the OCR tool to add text back.
Does grayscale reduce file size?
Usually yes, especially for colour scans and photos, because colour information is removed and images are recompressed.
Can I convert only some pages?
Split the pages you need first with Split PDF, convert them, and merge the result back if needed.