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Your file is processed on your device and is never sent to any server.
Turn a colour PDF black and white — to shrink scanned files, or to print without colour charges. Free, unlimited, and processed entirely on your device.
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There are two reasons people want a grey PDF. The first is size: a scanned colour document carries three colour channels of data for what is essentially black text on white paper, and dropping the colour can cut the file substantially. The second is printing: many print shops charge a colour rate for any page containing colour, even when the page looks black and white.
A PDF is not a picture. It is a set of drawing instructions — place this text here in this colour, draw this line, paint this photograph there. That makes “turn it grey” less simple than it sounds, and it is why this tool offers two genuinely different approaches rather than pretending there is one right answer.
Keep text sharp finds the photographs embedded in the document and desaturates those, writing them back in place. Your text stays real text: sharp at any zoom, selectable, searchable. For a scanned document this is all you need, because the scan is the image — the whole page turns grey and nothing is lost. The limitation is that coloured text and coloured vector graphics stay coloured, because changing them would mean rewriting the page's drawing instructions.
Convert everything renders each page and desaturates the result, so absolutely everything turns grey. The cost is real: the page becomes a picture, so the text is no longer selectable or searchable, and for a text-heavy document the file can end up larger than the original. Choose it when you genuinely need coloured text and charts converted.
A colour scan of a black-and-white page wastes space on colour data. Converting to grey removes it.
Print shops often bill any page containing colour at the colour rate. Converting first makes the cost predictable.
Rather than relying on a printer driver's own conversion, decide how the document looks yourself.
The steps people most often run before or after this one.
Usually yes, if the document contains photographs or scans, because colour information compresses away. A text-only PDF has almost no colour data to remove, so the saving will be small.
Use 'Keep text sharp' for scanned documents and for anything where you need the text to stay selectable. Use 'Convert everything' when coloured text, charts or logos must also turn grey.
In 'Keep text sharp' mode only embedded images are converted, because changing text colour would require rewriting the page's drawing instructions. Switch to 'Convert everything' if the text must be grey too.
Only in 'Convert everything' mode, which turns each page into an image. 'Keep text sharp' leaves the real text in place, so it stays selectable and searchable.
It gives you a predictable result rather than leaving the conversion to your printer driver. Some print shops also charge colour rates for any page containing colour, even if it prints black.
No. The colour information is discarded, so keep your original file if you might need it.