PDF to PNG

Turn the pages of a PDF into lossless PNG images at the resolution you pick, on your own machine.

Runs on your devicePDFWorkingNo account needed

What this tool does

PDF to PNG hands each selected page to pdf.js, which draws it onto a canvas, and the browser then encodes that canvas as a PNG. Nothing is thrown away in the encoding step, so hairlines, table rules and small type come back exactly as the renderer drew them, with none of the smearing a lossy codec leaves around sharp edges. There is no quality slider here for that reason — PNG has nothing to trade.

Every page becomes its own file, named after the source document with the page number attached: invoice-p1.png, invoice-p4.png. The resolution menu multiplies the page against its native 72-point grid, so 150 dpi is roughly double size and 300 dpi is what a printer expects. The scale is capped at eight times, which means the 600 dpi entry actually renders at about 576 dpi rather than the figure on the label.

One thing the format promises and this tool does not deliver: transparency. PNG carries an alpha channel, but the Background behind transparency swatch is filled across the whole canvas before the page is drawn, and it defaults to white with no option to leave it unpainted. Every image that comes out is therefore opaque. If you need a page knocked out against nothing — a logo lifted for compositing, say — a PDF to image conversion here will not give you it, and vector export from the original artwork is the right route instead.

Rasterising is a one-way door. Selectable text becomes pixels the moment a page is drawn, so the PNGs cannot be searched, copied from or reflowed, and dropping them back into a PDF does not restore the words. Because the whole job runs in this tab on your own processor, a long document at 300 dpi costs real time and real memory: progress is reported page by page and can be stopped partway, and a very large page at the top resolution can exceed the canvas size the browser will encode, which is reported as a failure to encode rather than a silent blank image.

How to use it

  1. Choose one PDF, or several. Files are worked through one after another, and each keeps its own filename as the prefix for the pages it produces.
  2. Pick a resolution. 72 dpi for a thumbnail, 150 for reading on screen, 300 for print. Higher settings multiply both the pixel count and the time taken.
  3. Narrow the page selection. Pages accepts all, a range like 1-5, a list like 2,7,9, or the words odd, even, first and last. A number past the end of the document is refused by name rather than ignored.
  4. Set the background colour. The swatch fills the canvas before each page is drawn. Leave it white for ordinary documents, or match it to whatever the images will sit on.
  5. Save the results. Each image is listed in page order by name and file size, above a summary giving the page count, the dpi used and the total written. Save them one at a time, or use Download all as ZIP once a run has produced more than one.

Processing & privacy

Runs on your device. Your file is processed directly in this browser.

Common use cases

Screenshots and diagrams pulled from a report

Line art and flat colour are where lossless encoding earns its size: no fringing along the strokes, no mottling in solid fills.

Feeding pages to something that only reads images

Layout tools, wikis and annotation apps that refuse a PDF will place a PNG without complaint.

Keeping a page as evidence

A rendered page cannot be edited by accident the way a live document can, and the pixels are exactly what the renderer produced.

Preparing a page for OCR elsewhere

Recognition engines read a clean 300 dpi PNG far better than a compressed one, because the artefacts that confuse them are never introduced.

Questions

Does the PDF get uploaded?
No. pdf.js runs inside this browser tab and the file is read straight from disk into memory, so the document itself is never sent anywhere. The one thing fetched over the network is the renderer script, which this site serves from its own address the first time you press the button.
Can I get PNGs with a transparent background?
No. A colour is painted across the canvas before every page is drawn, and the picker has no empty setting, so the exported images are always opaque. White is the default.
PNG or JPG for these pages?
PNG when the page is type, tables, charts or screenshots — nothing is lost and edges stay crisp. JPG when the page is mostly photographic and the file size matters more than perfect pixels.
Why are the files so large?
Lossless compression cannot discard detail, and a page of photographs at 300 dpi has a great deal of it. Text-heavy pages compress well because they are mostly flat white; scans do not. Dropping to 150 dpi, or switching to PDF to JPG or PDF to WebP, is the fix.
Can I still search the text afterwards?
Not in the images — glyphs have become pixels. Run PDF to Text on the original document when you want the words, or PDF OCR if the source was a scan to begin with.
Will it open a password-protected file?
No. The renderer stops at an encrypted document and says so. Remove the password with Unlock PDF using the one you already hold, then convert the result.
What happens with a long document?
Pages render one at a time with progress shown, so a hundred-page file works but takes a while and the tab holds each canvas in memory as it goes. Selecting only the pages you need is faster than rendering everything and deleting the rest.

Related tools

  • Merge PDF — Combine several PDFs into one document in the order you choose.
  • Split PDF — Split one PDF into separate documents by page range.
  • Compress PDF — Reduce PDF file size while preserving the quality that matters.
  • PDF to JPG — Export every page of a PDF as a JPG image.
  • JPG to PDF — Turn one or many JPG photos into a single PDF.
  • Protect PDF — Add a password and set permissions on a PDF.