Turn a colour PDF grey — for print shops that charge per colour page, and for scans that were saved in colour by mistake. Free in your browser — no sign-up, no watermarks.
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Every print shop and office copier charges several times more for a colour page than a monochrome one, and they charge it for a page with one blue hyperlink on it. The usual advice is "print it in black and white", which relies on whoever prints it choosing that — and on the print shop believing you. Converting the document itself settles it. It also fixes the other common case: a scan saved in colour, which stores three channels of a page that only ever had one.
PDF is the universal document format: it locks layout, fonts and images so a file looks identical on every device and printer. Scans, invoices, forms, e-books and reports all travel as PDF. Because a PDF is a container rather than an image, turning its pages into JPG or PNG pictures — or bundling pictures into a PDF — are among the most common file tasks there are.
Print shops and office copiers price by the page and by the ink, and a page counts as colour if there is any colour anywhere on it. One tinted table header, one logo in the corner, one blue hyperlink in a footnote, and a hundred-page report is billed as a hundred colour pages. The usual advice — "just print it in black and white" — puts the decision in the hands of whoever presses the button, and at a print shop that is not you.
Converting the document settles it before it leaves your hands. It also fixes the quieter version of the same waste: a scan saved in colour, carrying three channels of a page that only ever had black ink on it.
Colour in a PDF is not a property you can switch off. It lives inside the drawing instructions on every page — each line, each character, each fill carries its own colour — so removing it means rewriting all of them. Instead each page is rendered and stored as a grey image. The result looks the same and prints correctly, and the text is no longer text: it cannot be selected, searched or copied.
That is the right trade for a file you are sending to a printer and the wrong one for a file you are keeping. Keep the original and use this copy for printing.
The detail setting is the resolution each page is rendered at, and it decides the file size. Normal is right for anything that will be printed on office paper. Draft produces a noticeably smaller file and is fine for reading on screen or for a proof. High is for something going to a print shop on good paper, where the extra detail survives the process. Going higher than that stores detail no printer will reproduce.
A grey page holds one channel where a colour page holds three, so files usually shrink — sometimes considerably, for colour scans. If size is the actual goal rather than colour, Compress PDF does it without giving up the text layer.
Yes — completely free, with no sign-up, no watermarks and no daily quota. Processing happens in this browser, so the practical limit is the memory available on your device.
Yes. Add as many files as you like — each one is processed in sequence with its own progress status, and you can download the results individually or all together as a ZIP archive.
No. Pages are copied at the object level — text, fonts, images and vector content are carried over as-is, without re-rendering. The output keeps the same sharpness and searchable text as the original.
No, and that is the honest trade here. Colour in a PDF lives inside the drawing instructions, so changing it means rewriting every page — instead each page is rendered and stored as a grey image. The result looks identical and prints correctly, but the text is no longer selectable or searchable. If you need both, keep the original and use this copy for printing.
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