How to Convert a PDF to Grayscale
Updated July 13, 2026
A scanned document often carries a faint color tint and takes up more space than it needs to — stripping the color out gives you a cleaner, smaller, more legible result.
Steps
- Open PDF to Grayscale and drop your PDF above (or click to select).
- Choose a resolution (150 DPI is a good default).
- Click Convert, then download the grayscale images — all pages as a .zip.
How it works
Each page is rendered at the resolution you choose, then desaturated using standard luma weighting so the resulting tones look natural rather than flat or washed out. The output is a grayscale JPEG per page, which you can download individually or as one ZIP covering the whole document.
Why bother with grayscale
Beyond removing a color cast from a scan, grayscale images print without using any color ink, are noticeably smaller than their color originals, and tend to make printed text easier to read since there’s no color noise competing with it. Note the output here is a set of images, not a PDF — if you need a PDF back, run the grayscale images through JPG to PDF to reassemble them.
Notes
Conversion is fully local, so even a sensitive scan stays on your device throughout. Password-protected PDFs need to be unlocked first. For color output instead, PDF to JPG covers the same page-to-image conversion without desaturating.