How do I convert a PDF to JPG without losing quality?

"Convert PDF to JPG in high quality" is one of the most searched PDF questions there is. The usual reason is that someone already tried, and the result looked worse than the page did on screen. The text had a faint grey haze around it, fine lines had gone soft, and a certificate that looked crisp in the PDF looked cheap as a picture.

That is almost never the converter being careless. It is one of three things, and each has a different fix.

Where the quality actually goes

JPG compression. JPG is built for photographs. It saves space by throwing away detail the eye is unlikely to miss, and on a photograph that works very well. On black text on a white background it leaves a halo of grey specks around every letter. This is the fuzziness people notice first.

Too few pixels. A PDF page has no resolution of its own. It is a set of drawing instructions that can be drawn at any size. Turning it into an image fixes a pixel count, and if that count is low, small text breaks up.

The source. If the PDF is a scan, the page is already a picture, at whatever resolution the scanner used. Converting it cannot add detail that was never captured.

JPG or PNG for a page of text

If you are unsure, choose PNG. Its only real cost is file size, and a large file is a smaller problem than a blurry one.

What 150 DPI gives you

PDF to Image draws every page at 150 dots per inch. That number is fixed; there is no resolution setting to change. In pixels it works out like this:

That is sharper than any screen shows a full page, comfortably enough for a slide, an email, a website or an upload form, and large enough to crop one chart or one paragraph out of the page and still read it.

Where it is not enough is printing the image at full page size. Print work is usually prepared at 300 DPI, and a 150 DPI image printed on a full sheet looks slightly soft on small text. If the page is going to paper, print the PDF itself, not an image of it.

Converting, step by step

1. Open PDF to Image and choose your PDF.
2. Under Format, pick PNG or JPG using the table above.
3. In Pages, leave the box empty for every page, or type the pages you want, such as 3, or 1-3, or 2,5,9. Separate them with commas.
4. Press Convert to images.
5. Press Download. One page comes back as a single image named after your PDF. Several pages come back as a ZIP, with the images named page-001, page-002 and so on after their page numbers.

The PDF is converted on our server, and the upload is deleted as soon as the images are built. A PDF that needs a password to open has to be unlocked first.

When it is still blurry as a PNG

Then the blur was in the file. The page is a scan, and the scanner or phone captured it at low resolution or slightly out of focus.

Converting again at any setting will not fix that. What can help is Enhance: more contrast and sharpening make faint, soft text easier to read. It improves how the pixels look; it does not create new ones. If the original paper is still available, scanning it again at a higher setting is the only real cure.

What does not survive the trip

An image is a picture of the page, so anything that was more than a picture is lost:

• Links stop being clickable.
• Text can no longer be selected, searched or copied.
• Form fields become drawings of form fields.
• Transparency does not appear. The page's white background comes out as white pixels in both formats.

If you need the words out of the page rather than a picture of it, PDF to Text is the right tool. If you later need the images back in one document, Image to PDF does that, although the text stays a picture.

A note on size

A page of text is a few kilobytes as PDF drawing instructions and a few hundred kilobytes as pixels. So converting to images makes files bigger, not smaller. If the real goal was a smaller file to send, Compress PDF is the tool for that.