Convert PDF to PNG
A PDF page as a picture, with clean edges on text and drawings.
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How it works
Add your images
Drag and drop, paste, or pick files. They upload over an encrypted connection.
Pick a quality or a target size
Use the quality slider, or tell it exactly how many KB or MB you need.
Download
Save each file, or grab them all at once as a ZIP.
PNG is the better picture format for most PDF pages. Documents are text, tables, diagrams and flat colour, and JPEG leaves a faint haze around exactly those hard edges. PNG stores each pixel as it was drawn, so letters stay clean at any zoom, and for a page of text the file is often smaller than the JPG would be.
The page is rendered on a white sheet, as a printer would produce it, at 200 dots per inch. For A4 that gives about 1650 by 2340 pixels. A PDF with more than one page shows a page number in the editor; change it and that page is rendered in its place, one page per conversion. Use Resize when you need an exact pixel size, for a slide or a thumbnail for example.
Choose JPG instead when the page is mostly photographs, where PNG files get large. Because the page becomes pixels, its text cannot be selected afterwards, and links stop working; keep the PDF if you need those. A PDF that needs a password to open cannot be converted. The PDF is sent over an encrypted connection, rendered on our own servers and removed within one hour.
Why a page of text makes a small PNG
PNG packs repeated values very efficiently, and a printed page is mostly repetition: long runs of white, broken by short runs of black. An A4 page of text at 200 dpi usually comes to 100 to 300 KB as a lossless PNG, less than a JPG of the same page and with perfectly clean letters. Take the quality below 90 and the page is stored with a reduced palette, which for black text on white changes nothing you can see and can halve the file again.
A scanned PDF behaves the opposite way. Each page is a photograph of paper, with grain and shadows, and as a PNG it can reach 5 to 10 MB. Scans are the one kind of PDF page for which JPG is the better output.
Sharper than a screenshot
The quick way to get a picture of a PDF page is a screenshot, and it is also the worst. A document viewed at normal zoom is shown at roughly 100 pixels per inch, so a screenshot captures half the detail of a 200 dpi rendering in each direction, a quarter in total. The difference shows the moment the picture is enlarged on a slide or printed in a handout. Converting the page also gives you the whole sheet, with no toolbar or scroll bar to trim away and no risk of capturing a notification with it.
Figures from reports and papers
A frequent use is lifting a diagram, a chart or a table out of a report for a presentation. Convert the page that holds it, then use Crop in the editor to keep only the figure. Because the output is PNG, thin axis lines, small labels and legend text stay as crisp as they were on the page, and the figure sits cleanly on a white slide.
If the figure has to go on a coloured background, remember that the page is drawn on white. A drawing saved as an Illustrator or EPS file is a different case, since those are rendered on a transparent sheet, and this site has separate converters for both. Credit the source when the figure is not your own.
Frequently asked questions
Is the background transparent?
No. A PDF page is drawn on white, as it would print.
PNG or JPG for a PDF page?
PNG for text, tables and diagrams. JPG for pages that are mostly photographs.
How do I get a different page?
When the PDF has more than one page, a page number appears in the editor. Change it and the picture is drawn again.
Can I get a higher resolution than 200 dpi?
Not at the moment. 200 dpi is the highest the page is drawn at.
Can I pull the original photos out of a PDF at full resolution?
No. The page is drawn as a whole at 200 dpi. Pictures embedded at a higher resolution are scaled to that, like everything else on the page.
Why is my PNG several megabytes?
The page is probably a scan or is covered with photographs. Lossless storage is expensive for that kind of content. Lower the quality below 90, or choose JPG in the Format menu.