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Remove the colour from every page of a PDF, directly in your browser.
Drag & drop your file here
or browse from your device
A pale photocopy is hard to read and a harsh one is tiring. Lifting the contrast on a faint scan often makes the difference between a document you can read and one you squint at, and it helps OCR considerably too.
Contrast is applied before brightness, because contrast works around the middle of the range and shifting the brightness first moves that middle and gives odd results.
In a normal PDF the text is text. Each letter is stored as an instruction saying which letter it is and where it goes, which is why it stays sharp at any zoom, why you can select and copy it, and why searching works.
Changing how a page looks means redrawing it, and a redrawn page is a picture. The words are still perfectly readable, but they are now made of dots. Selecting, copying, and searching all stop working, and the file usually gets bigger.
That trade is worth making for what these tools do. It is worth knowing about beforehand rather than discovering later, and worth keeping your original file for.
Drag the file onto the upload area, or browse from your device.
Contrast first for a faint scan, then brightness if it needs it.
Every page is redrawn on your own device, with nothing uploaded.
Save it. Your original PDF is left untouched.
Add your PDF and raise the contrast, which is usually what a pale photocopy needs. Lowering the brightness slightly at the same time often helps the text stand out further.
Because contrast works by pushing colours away from the middle of the range. Change the brightness first and that middle has moved, so the contrast pushes around the wrong point and the result comes out odd. Doing it in this order behaves the way people expect.
It controls how strong the colours are. Turn it down and everything drifts toward grey, turn it up and the colours get bolder. Leave it alone for an ordinary black and white document.
Often, yes. Text recognition struggles with faint pages, and lifting the contrast before running OCR can make a real difference. Try it if the OCR tool gives you a low confidence score.
No, and this matters. Every page is redrawn as a picture, so the words become part of that picture. They look the same but cannot be selected, copied, or searched. Keep your original if you need those things.
Because text takes almost no room. A letter is stored as an instruction saying which letter it is, while a picture of that same letter has to store every dot that makes it up. Choosing the screen quality setting brings the size back down.
No. Everything runs inside your browser on your own device. Your file is never sent anywhere, and nothing is stored.
No. Your original PDF stays exactly as it is. The tool creates a new file for you to download.
Yes. It is completely free with no sign-up and no limits.
Continue working with your images and PDF files using these free browser based tools.