Convert a PDF to PNG
PNG keeps every pixel exactly, which is what pages of text and diagrams need. This opens with PNG already selected.
Convert a PDF to images
Drag a PDF here, or choose one
PDF files up to 25.00 MB, up to 50 pages at a time.
Your PDF is read in this browser tab. It is not uploaded.
When PNG is the right choice
PNG is the format to pick when the page has to stay sharp. It stores every pixel exactly, so nothing is softened or smudged, and that matters most for precisely the content PDFs usually hold:
- pages of text, where JPG leaves faint haloes around letters;
- invoices, statements and tables with thin ruled lines;
- diagrams, charts and technical drawings, where a blurred line is a wrong line;
- screenshots of a document going into documentation, where artefacts look like mistakes;
- anything that will be printed or zoomed into.
Where PNG is the wrong choice
Pages that are mostly photographs. PNG cannot compress continuous tone efficiently, so a scanned photo page can come out several times larger than the same page as a JPG with no visible benefit. If your document is a scan of printed photographs rather than text, use PDF to JPG.
Size is also the reason to think about resolution. A page at 300 DPI holds four times the pixels of the same page at 150, and a lossless format passes that straight on to the file size. Start at 150 DPI and go up only if you can see why you need to.
What stays and what is lost
The pixels are preserved perfectly. Everything that was not a pixel is not:
- Text becomes an image. It can no longer be selected, searched, copied or read by a screen reader.
- Links, bookmarks and form fields stop working. They are drawn but inert.
- The page becomes a fixed size. A PDF can be scaled to any resolution; a PNG has the one it was rendered at.
Keep the original PDF. The PNG is a faithful picture of it, not a replacement for it.
Common questions
- Why is the PNG so much larger than a JPG would be?
- Because PNG is lossless: it records every pixel exactly rather than approximating the image to save room. For a page of black text on white that is efficient, since PNG compresses large flat areas well. For a page that is mostly a scanned photograph it is not, and the file can be several times the size of the equivalent JPG. Scanned photos are the case where PDF to JPG is the better choice.
- Will the PNG have a transparent background?
- No. PDF pages are transparent wherever nothing is drawn, so a straight render would give you letters floating on nothing — which looks fine against a white page in a browser and wrong against anything else. Celveri fills the background with white before drawing, so the PNG looks like the page you were reading.
- Is this good enough for printing?
- Yes, at the right resolution. Choose 300 DPI and the result carries as much detail as most print workflows use. PNG adds no compression artefacts of its own, so what you see is what the original page drew. Bear in mind the image is still a fixed grid of pixels, whereas the PDF was resolution-independent — printing the PDF directly will always be at least as sharp.
- Is my PDF uploaded?
- No. The rendering happens in your browser with pdf.js, the engine Firefox uses to display PDFs, and each download comes from the copy made in the tab. The engine and its font data are served from celveri.com rather than a third-party CDN, so no outside service learns that you opened a document.
- Can I get one PNG containing all the pages?
- No — you get one image per page. Stitching pages into a single tall image is a different job, and a page that claimed to do it without actually doing it would be no use to you. If you need the pages side by side in one file, assembling them in an image editor after converting is the reliable route.
- Does the text stay selectable?
- No, and no image format can manage that. Rendering a page turns its text into pixels; the words become a picture of words. Keep the original PDF if you will need to search or copy from it later.