Black and White Image Converter

Make a photo black and white

Turning a color picture into a black and white photo removes distractions and puts focus on shape, light and texture. This tool offers two modes: classic grayscale with every shade of gray, and high-contrast pure black and white for stamps, stencils, line art and document scans.

The conversion runs locally on a canvas in your browser. The live preview updates as you move the controls, and your image is never uploaded to any server. HEIC, TIFF and BMP photos are supported as well as the usual JPG, PNG and WebP.

Grayscale vs pure black and white

Grayscale converts each pixel to its perceived brightness, using the Rec. 709 weights that count green more than red and blue. The result looks like a traditional monochrome photograph. Pure black & white goes further: pixels brighter than the threshold become white and the rest become black. Lower the threshold for a lighter result, raise it for a darker one.

Where it helps

Use grayscale for artistic portraits, forms that require monochrome images, and saving printer ink. Use pure black and white for cleaning up scanned text, creating logos for engraving or cutting, and preparing stencils. Save as PNG to keep every pixel exact, or as JPG or WebP for smaller files. Transparent areas turn white when saving as JPG.

The threshold slider responds smoothly even on large photos, because the original pixels are kept in memory and only the brightness test is repeated. Transparency is preserved in PNG and WebP output, and browsers that cannot encode WebP save PNG instead. For scanned pages, start at the default of 128 and nudge it until the text is solid black and the paper turns clean white. To boost contrast before converting, use photo filters; for the opposite effect, the invert colors tool creates a negative.