PNG is the format to reach for when a PDF page has to become a picture and still look sharp. It is lossless, so small text, thin lines, charts and logos come out crisp instead of picking up the faint blur that JPG compression leaves around edges. It also supports transparency, which matters when the page holds a logo or artwork you want to place on a colored background.
This converter draws each page of your PDF with pdf.js, the same engine Firefox uses to show PDFs, and saves it as a PNG at the resolution you choose. It runs in your browser: the PDF is read and drawn on your own device and is never uploaded.
How to convert a PDF to PNG
- Drop the PDF on the box at the top of this page, or click the box and choose the file. The file name, page count and size appear once it is open.
- Choose a Resolution: 72, 150, 300 or 600 DPI. The hint under the buttons shows the pixel size page 1 will have, so you know what you will get before you start.
- Choose a Background: White for normal documents, Transparent for logos, icons and artwork that should have no box behind them.
- Leave Pages empty to convert every page, or type the pages you want, such as
1-3, 7or10-for page 10 to the end. - Click Convert. A progress bar counts the pages as they are drawn.
- Check the thumbnails, then click Download under any page or Download all as ZIP. Files are named after your PDF and the page, for example
price-list-page-3.png.
Which resolution to pick
DPI (dots per inch) sets how many pixels each inch of the page becomes. A PDF page has a physical size, so the pixel size follows directly: a US Letter page is 8.5 x 11 inches, so at 150 DPI it becomes 1275 x 1650 pixels. Doubling the DPI doubles both sides and roughly quadruples the work and the file size.
| DPI | US Letter (8.5 x 11 in) | A4 (210 x 297 mm) | Good for |
|---|---|---|---|
| 72 | 612 x 792 px | 595 x 842 px | Thumbnails and quick previews |
| 150 | 1275 x 1650 px | 1240 x 1754 px | Websites, slides, email, chat apps |
| 300 | 2550 x 3300 px | 2480 x 3508 px | Printing at full size, zooming into detail |
| 600 | 5100 x 6600 px | 4961 x 7016 px | Logos and line art you will scale up or cut out |
For screens, 150 DPI is almost always enough. Use 300 DPI for anything that will be printed, and keep 600 DPI for small graphics such as a logo you plan to enlarge, since a full page at 600 DPI is a 33-megapixel image that takes a while to draw and makes a large file.
To stay inside what browsers can safely handle, a single page is capped at about 50 megapixels and 14,000 pixels on its longest side. A normal page never reaches that, even at 600 DPI. Very large pages, such as an engineering drawing or a poster, are drawn at the highest resolution that fits, and the converter tells you which pages were reduced.
White or transparent background
A PDF page has no background of its own unless the file draws one. PDF viewers paint white behind every page, which is why most pages look white. With White selected, the converter does the same, and you get the page exactly as it looks in a viewer.
With Transparent selected, the converter leaves the empty parts of the page see-through. The thumbnails show a checkerboard where the PNG has no color, so you can see the effect before you download. This is what you want for:
- A logo or icon exported from a design app as PDF, to place on a website header or a product mockup.
- Stickers, labels and clip art from a vector PDF, to use in Canva, Photoshop or a print-on-demand template.
- Signatures or stamps drawn on an otherwise empty page.
Transparency only appears where the PDF really has nothing. Many documents, including most scanned pages and many exports from Word or PowerPoint, draw a solid white rectangle or a full-page image behind their content. That rectangle is part of the page, so it stays in the PNG. The converter checks the corners of each page and tells you when a page has its own solid background, so you are not left wondering why the result is not transparent.
Tip: to get just the logo from a page that also has other content, cut the page down first with Crop PDF, then convert the cropped file at 600 DPI with a transparent background. You get a tight PNG with no extra empty space around it.
PNG or JPG for PDF pages
PNG keeps every pixel exactly as it was drawn. JPG throws away detail the eye is less likely to notice, which works well for photos but leaves soft halos around black text on white. The trade is file size: a text page saved as PNG is usually larger than the same page as JPG, and a page full of photos can be several times larger.
| Page content | Better format | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Text, tables, forms | PNG | Edges stay sharp and readable when zoomed |
| Charts, diagrams, line art | PNG | Flat colors compress well and stay exact |
| Logos needing transparency | PNG | JPG has no transparency |
| Photo-heavy catalog or brochure pages | JPG | Much smaller files with no visible loss |
| Scanned documents | JPG, or PNG at 150 DPI | Scans contain noise that PNG stores at full cost |
If you want JPG instead, use PDF to JPG, which has the same page selection. If a PNG is too heavy for a website, run it through the image compressor, which can shrink PNGs while keeping them lossless or near lossless.
Worked examples
A logo for a website header
A designer sends a brand logo as a one-page PDF on a Letter page. Converting the whole page at 600 DPI with a transparent background gives a 5100 x 6600 pixel PNG with the logo somewhere in the middle and a lot of empty space. Instead, crop the PDF to the logo first, say a 4 x 1.5 inch area. At 600 DPI that becomes a 2400 x 900 pixel transparent PNG, sharp enough for a retina header that displays at 400 x 150 and for print on a business card.
Three pages from a supplier catalog
A 48-page wholesale catalog arrives as a PDF and you need pages 12, 13 and 14 for a team chat. Type 12-14 in Pages, pick 150 DPI and White, and click Convert. You get three PNGs of 1275 x 1650 pixels (for a Letter-size catalog) in about the time it takes to read this paragraph, then download them as one ZIP.
A slide deck exported as PDF
Slides exported from PowerPoint or Google Slides at 16:9 are usually 10 x 5.625 inches. At 150 DPI each slide becomes 1500 x 844 pixels, a good size for a blog post. At 300 DPI they become 3000 x 1688 pixels, enough for a full-screen display or print.
Product images from catalogs
Store owners often turn supplier catalogs into images for listings. A rendered catalog page is only as good as the PDF, and the supplier's photos usually belong to them, so check you have the right to use them. When the supplier also sells through a public Shopify or WooCommerce store, the AM Jarvis Product Importer copies products straight into your store with their original images, variants and prices, which beats cropping screenshots out of a catalog.
Other ways to save a PDF as PNG
- Mac: open the PDF in Preview, choose File > Export, set Format to PNG and pick a resolution. Preview exports only the page you are viewing, so for a long document or a page range this converter is quicker.
- Windows: there is no built-in PDF to PNG export. The Snipping Tool can capture a page, but only at your screen's resolution, which is often less than 150 DPI for a full page.
- iPhone and Android: open this page in Safari or Chrome, tap the drop zone, choose the PDF from Files or Downloads, and download the PNGs. On iPhone they land in the Files app, and from there you can save them to Photos.
Whichever route you take, the pixel math is the same: page inches times DPI. Knowing it lets you pick the smallest resolution that still looks sharp where the image will be shown.
Troubleshooting
- The PNG is not transparent. The page draws its own white box or is a scan. The converter says so under the result. Transparent output only works for PDFs whose empty areas are truly empty, which is typical of logos and artwork exported from design apps.
- Text looks fuzzy when zoomed in. Raise the resolution. 150 DPI is meant for viewing at normal size; use 300 or 600 DPI if you will zoom or crop.
- The conversion is slow or the tab struggles. High DPI on many pages uses a lot of memory. Convert a smaller page range at a time, or use 150 DPI. On a phone, stick to a few pages at 300 DPI.
- The file says it is password protected. The PDF is encrypted and needs its password to open. Remove the password first with Unlock PDF (you need to know the password), then convert the unlocked copy.
- Fonts look different from the original. The PDF probably does not embed its fonts, so the browser substitutes similar ones. Open the file in another viewer to compare; the converter draws what the file contains.
- A page comes out sideways. The page is stored rotated. Turn it upright with the Rotate PDF tool and convert again.
What this converter does and does not do
- It renders pages. Each PNG is a picture of the whole page as a PDF viewer shows it, including text, vector graphics, images, and form fields and comments that have a visible appearance.
- It does not pull the original embedded photos out of the PDF at their native size. To get a sharp copy of one photo, convert at 300 DPI or higher and crop the image.
- The PNG holds a picture of text, not text. To get copyable text, use PDF to Text. For a scanned page, run the PNG through Image to Text (OCR).
- It does not open password-protected PDFs, and it does not change your original file.
Privacy and limits
Everything happens in your browser. The PDF is read from your disk into the page, drawn on a canvas and saved as PNG on your device. Nothing is sent to our server, and once the page has loaded it keeps working even if you go offline.
The tool is free with no daily limit, no sign-up and no watermark. How large a PDF you can convert depends on your device's memory: long documents at 300 or 600 DPI are more reliable on a laptop or desktop than on a phone. To go the other way and turn PNG images into a document, use PNG to PDF.