How to grayscale / greyscale a PDF
First published on June 16, 2006
I used to work for a school newsletter (actually, more like “donate unheard of amounts of unpaid time”) and you know advertisers… they’re always so last-minute! Last-minute ads are usually OK, unless they require modification, such as grayscaling! How in the world do you grayscale a PDF? I thought it’d be one of the most basic features to include in a terribly expensive program such as Adobe Acrobat, but no, it is nowhere to be found (September 10th update: read on… it actually does exist!). Technically, you can right click each item in Acrobat and “edit” it, but that’s a real pain in the ass, and sometimes it messes up item placement. You could also save the PDF as an image file, grayscale it, then re-PDF it, but that compromises quality and file size, among other things.
Anyway, I asked around to all the graphics artists that I knew, and did all the Google and Google Groups searching that I could. The graphics people said that real artists do their grayscaling before creating a PDF. Well, I was dealing with a time-crunch here! As for Google, I found nothing (maybe my searching skills suck)!
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September 10th update:
Looks like there IS a feature built into Adobe Acrobat Professional (I just tested this on version 7.0)! There is no need to buy an extra, expensive piece of software as noted when I first made this post!
Select Tools… Print Production… Convert Colors…
Then, select one of the profiles that do grayscaling (such as one of the dot gains)
Based on a quick comparison, this already-built-in feature gives slightly worse quality than the Quite a Box of Tricks plugin that I mentioned below… but hey… free is better than not free.
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In the end, one of my CGA-Canada cronies (thank you, kind sir aka Mentos Man) discovered this program called Quite a Box Of Tricks. It’s a plugin for Acrobat and works wonders. And by wonders, I mean it’s the only solution I’ve ever found and it is fast and easy. The downside, unfortunately, is that it costs a freakin’ 125 British pounds!
So, if you’re reading this and want to create a free tool that will grayscale a PDF, please let me know so that I can update this post. Otherwise, Quite a Box of Tricks is all we’ve got!
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February 24th, 2009 at 4:25 am
Tally says:
Hello
I wish to convert a few pdf files from color to greyscale – how do I do it?
where is the convert color that’s was written in the 10th sep update
(I used Do-Pdf V6 to convert word file to pdf)
Thanks Tally
February 24th, 2009 at 11:14 am
Peter says:
Hi Tally,
What I found is that you must use the pricey Adobe Acrobat Professional. If there are cheaper or free options, I’d love to hear about it
April 27th, 2011 at 10:07 am
JohnSmith says:
Download Bullzip for free. It’s a PDF printer so you can print to it from any program. It allows you to print in monochrome. Free and easy.
August 8th, 2013 at 12:55 pm
Bob Cueblo says:
Check out http://greyscalepdf.com. You don’t even have to download anything you can convert your PDFs for free right on the website.
I just used it and it worked awesome.
April 14th, 2015 at 4:55 am
scruss says:
Or you could use Ghostscript:
gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sColorConversionStrategy=Gray -dProcessColorModel=/DeviceGray -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -dSAFER -q -sOutputFile=grey.pdf — colour.pdf
(modified from here: http://handyfloss.net/2008.09/making-a-pdf-grayscale-with-ghostscript/ )
April 19th, 2018 at 6:13 am
Steph says:
Just in case anyone visits this in the future: A wonderful human created a free website to do this conversion!
http://greyscalepdf.com/
April 19th, 2018 at 6:14 am
Steph says:
Oops… someone got to the recommendation before me…
Anyway, Bravo to lovely humans!