How to Convert a PDF to JPG or PNG (and Which One to Pick)
Turning PDF pages into images sounds simple until the text comes out fuzzy. DPI is the setting that decides it — how to choose it, and when to use PNG instead.
Updated August 11, 20265 min read
Converting a PDF page into an image is a rendering job: something has to draw the vectors, text and embedded pictures onto a pixel grid, and you choose how fine that grid is. Almost every complaint about the result — fuzzy text, enormous files, a page that looks nothing like it did in the reader — traces back to that one choice. Here is how to make it correctly, and when converting to an image is the wrong idea entirely.
DPI is the only setting that really matters
A PDF page has no inherent pixel size. It has a physical size — usually A4 or US Letter — and its text is stored as vector outlines that can be drawn at any scale. DPI (dots per inch) tells the renderer how many pixels to produce per inch of that physical page.
| DPI | A4 page becomes | Good for |
|---|---|---|
| 72 | 595 × 842 px | Thumbnails and previews only |
| 150 | 1240 × 1754 px | On-screen reading, email, web embedding |
| 300 | 2480 × 3508 px | Printing, archiving, running OCR |
| 600 | 4960 × 7016 px | Fine detail, small-text documents, large-format print |
150 DPI is the sensible default for anything that will be looked at on a screen. 300 is the right answer whenever the image will be printed or fed into text recognition, because OCR accuracy falls off sharply below it. Going to 600 quadruples the file size relative to 300 and is only worth it for documents with very small print. On our converter, 600 DPI on an A4 page needs Pro: Free exports up to 4096 px on the long side, which for A4 is about 2896 × 4096 px.
JPG or PNG?
It depends entirely on what is on the page, and the difference is much larger than people expect.
- PNG for pages that are mostly text, tables, diagrams or line art. It is lossless, so letterforms stay crisp with no halos around the strokes. On a typical text page PNG is also *smaller* than JPG, because large white areas compress almost to nothing.
- JPG for pages dominated by photographs — a magazine spread, a brochure, a photo-heavy report. On continuous-tone content JPG is dramatically more efficient and the loss is invisible.
The default assumption that JPG is always smaller is wrong for documents. A page of black text on white paper is exactly the content type PNG was designed for, and exactly the content type JPG handles worst — its compression invents grey speckle around every letter.
The workflow
Decide where the image is going
Screen or print? That answer sets your DPI: 150 for screen, 300 for print or OCR. Everything else follows.
Pick the format from the content
Text and diagrams → PDF to PNG. Photographs → PDF to JPG.
Convert only the pages you need
A 200-page PDF at 300 DPI produces 200 large images. If you need page 47, export page 47.
Check the text at 100% zoom
Not zoomed out, where everything looks fine. At full size, on the smallest text in the document.
Choose your pages and resolution. Rendering happens on your device — the document is never uploaded.
Convert a PDF to imagesWhen you should not convert to an image
Converting a PDF to images is often a workaround for a problem with a better solution.
| What you actually want | Better approach |
|---|---|
| The text out of the document | PDF to Text — extracts words, not pictures of words |
| A smaller file to email | Compress the PDF — keeps it searchable |
| To stop someone editing it | Images do not prevent editing; they only prevent easy editing |
| To hide sensitive content | Proper redaction in the PDF editor (Pro) — see below |
| Just a few pages | Split the PDF — still a document, still searchable |
The redaction row deserves emphasis. Converting a page to an image *does* flatten it, so text you covered with a black box genuinely cannot be selected afterwards. But it is a blunt instrument: you lose the whole document's searchability to hide one paragraph, and the file usually gets larger. Proper redaction removes the underlying content while leaving the rest of the document intact — see how to redact a PDF so the text is really gone.
Going the other way
The reverse conversion is at least as common: photographs of documents that need to become a single PDF for an upload form. Use image to PDF for a mixed set, or the format-specific JPG to PDF and PNG to PDF pages.
Two things to get right when doing that. Straighten and crop the photos first — a scan that is visibly tilted reads as careless, and the perspective correction tool fixes the keystoning you get from photographing a page at an angle. And put the pages in order before converting, since fixing the sequence afterwards means going back into a page-reordering tool.
A PDF built from images has one important property: it contains no text layer, so nothing in it is searchable. If the document needs to be findable later, run OCR over it and keep the text alongside.
Frequently asked questions
What DPI should I use to convert a PDF to JPG?
150 DPI for anything viewed on screen, 300 DPI for printing or for running text recognition. Below 150 the text starts to look soft; above 300 you are mostly buying file size rather than visible detail unless the document has very small print.
Why is my converted image blurry?
The DPI was too low. PDF text is stored as vectors with no fixed resolution, so rendering at 72 DPI produces genuinely coarse pixels. Re-render at 150 or 300 — you cannot sharpen the detail back afterwards.
Should I convert PDF pages to JPG or PNG?
PNG for text, tables and diagrams — it is lossless and usually smaller for that content. JPG for pages dominated by photographs. Converting a text page to JPG produces visible grey speckle around every letter.
Can I convert only one page of a PDF?
Yes. Specify the page or range before converting rather than exporting everything and deleting the rest — at 300 DPI a long document produces a very large set of images you have no use for.