Grayscale PDF Converter

Grayscale turns every colour in a PDF into a shade of grey. Text stays sharp and photos keep their detail, but no colour is left.

Printing is the main reason to do it. Colour ink and toner cost more per page than black, and many office printers are set to black and white, which can turn coloured text pale and hard to read.

Some submission systems ask for black-and-white documents, including certain court filing portals, exam boards and older archives. Converting first shows you exactly what they will see.

Grayscale can also shrink files with colour photos or coloured backgrounds, because grey images need less data than full colour.

Check charts after converting. Lines that were only told apart by colour, such as red for this year and blue for last year, may look almost identical in grey.

Highlighted text can turn into dark grey bands. If your document uses a lot of highlighting, test print one page first.

Signatures in blue ink stay visible but lose the colour that some people use to show a document is an original. Keep a colour copy if that matters to you.

Grayscale isn't the same as pure black and white. Shades of grey are kept, so photos still look like photos rather than harsh black shapes.

If the file is still large after converting, run it through Compress PDF.

Keep your colour original. You can always make another grey copy, but you can't add colour back.