PDF Black & White Converter
Convert every page of a PDF into pure black and white using an adjustable brightness threshold. Free, private, runs entirely in your browser.
Click to select a PDF file, or drag and drop
Your file never leaves your browserBlack/white threshold: 128
Pixels brighter than this value turn white, everything else turns black. Lower the threshold if your output looks too dark; raise it if too much detail is lost to white.How to Convert a PDF to Black & White
- Upload the PDF you want to convert.
- Adjust the threshold slider if needed — every pixel brighter than the threshold becomes pure white, and everything else becomes pure black. The default of 128 works well for most text documents.
- Click Convert to Black & White and download the result.
Grayscale vs. Black & White — what's the difference?
These are two different, commonly confused conversions. Grayscale (see the PDF Grayscale Converter) keeps a smooth range of gray shades based on each pixel's brightness — it looks like a black-and-white photograph. Black & White (this tool) uses a hard threshold so every pixel becomes either pure black or pure white with no shades of gray in between — it looks like a fax, photocopy, or line drawing. This binary threshold behavior is what makes this tool distinct.
Example
A scanned page with a slightly yellowed background and faded gray text becomes a crisp black-on-white page once thresholded — the background clips to pure white and the text clips to pure black, similar to output from an old fax machine or photocopier.
Common Use Cases
- Cleaning up a low-contrast scan so text stands out sharply against a pure white background.
- Preparing line art, forms, or diagrams for a fax machine or basic monochrome printer.
- Producing a stark, high-contrast look for archival scans of typewritten documents.
FAQ
- What does the threshold control? It's the brightness cutoff (0-255) that decides whether a pixel becomes white or black. A higher threshold makes more pixels turn black; a lower threshold makes more turn white.
- Will my text still be selectable afterward? No — the conversion requires redrawing each page as an image, so text and vector content become part of a flattened, non-selectable image.
- My photos look too harsh after conversion — why? A hard black/white threshold discards all mid-tones, so photographs lose detail. This tool is best suited to text documents, forms, and line art rather than photographs — use the Grayscale Converter instead if you need to preserve photo detail.
- Is my file uploaded anywhere? No — conversion happens entirely in your browser.