How to convert pdf to jpg, png, tiff, eps offline for free?

You got a PDF from one of your friends that has a beautiful image. It could be a set of images that is scanned and converted into a PDF.

You look at the PDF and realize that a particular page is what you have been longing for. But neither you nor your friend knows how to extract an image our of that PDF and use it for your purpose.

You get your friend’s permission and start looking at ways to export them as JPG, PNG, TIFF, and many other formats.

There are many such scenarios where you might have possibly badly wanted an image out of a PDF.

You don’t need to take and printout and scan them using any of these types of scanners and then get involved in the process of removing the gray background.

Instead you can use the following methods and be relieved.

Let us in this article check out the best ways to convert PDF to images for free, in the most used three operating systems:

1. Windows
2. Mac
3. Linux

PDF to Image Convertor for Windows

Since PCs are widely used and Windows is the OS that supports them, let us start from Windows.

PDFill Tools

Well, this is a freemium software that offers everything that we want to achieve in its free version. The only annoying thing about this is that it takes us to its website when we close the application once our job is done.

You upgrade the software to its premium version, and the software stops irritating you.

There will be bonus tips till the end if you did not like this software. Please read through the end.

PDFill is a kind of software that unfortunately works only with windows. If you want this kind of software on Mac or Linux, please skip this section.

So, let us start by downloading the software or tool (to be specific) from this link.

Once you download, please follow the below steps to install (which is what you essentially do when you install any software for the matter).

1. Click on the binary or the executable (to be precise, because you are on windows) you just downloaded.
2. You will need to click on the Next button
3. See if you want to change the path of PDFills installation. In most cases leaving as-is is recommended
4. Click on Finish to complete the installation process

After the completion of the installation, you should have the program to be installed on the computer. Search for the program from the search bar of the menu.

Go to the start menu, search for PDFill. You will find two PDFill instances.

1. PDFill PDF Tools (Free)
2. PDFill PDF Editor

What we are interested in this article is the former one – PDFill PDF Tools. This software is a set of tools that helps us modify PDFs in the following ways:

1. Merge PDF Files
2. Split or Reorder Pages
3. Encrypt and Decrypt Options
4. Rotate or Crop PDF Pages
5. Reformat Multiple Pages
6. Add Header and Footer
7. Add Watermark by Text
8. Add Watermark by Image
9. Convert Images to PDF
10. Convert PDF to Images
11. PDF Form Field Operations
12. Convert PostScript into PDF
13. Add PDF Information
14. Scan into Image or PDF
15. Create Transparent Image

Look at the possibilities of the PDFill Tools. There is almost everything that you can do when it comes to the PDFs. You guessed it right, the tenth item in the list i.e. “Convert PDF to Images” is the one that we will be exploring in this article.

Click the button that says “Convert PDF to Images”. You will be taken to a new window. This is where you need to select the PDF that you are interested in converting to an image.

Once you select comes the next page, where there are a few options selection of which are very important for the PDF to get converted to an image.

Before the first option, there is a label that talks about the no. of pages the PDF has. This will help you when in the next text box, you have to enter the pages that you want to extract, entering from, and to.

What happens here is each page will be exported as an image from what you have selected. Typically, we select all the pages starting from the first page to the last.

The next textbox is the resolution. Resolution is the no. of pixels stored in an image. The more no of pixels or dots in an image, the better will be the quality of the image along with the size (which will obviously be larger).

You can enter 300 here if you want a decent quality image and 600 if you want a printout of the image at a much bigger size. Mostly 300 is more than enough for your digital purpose.

Leave the Color Bits and Page Number Digits as is. Even if you want to edit, you will not be allowed as they are read-only.

The next option is the type of image you want to export the set of pages from the PDF. Typically, it will be PNG or JPG.

When you select JPG, you will be allowed to enter the compression level, which is nothing but the image quality. If you want the best quality, then select100 and for lowest, select 1. Don’t forget that this affects both the size and quality of the images.

Once you select all these options, you can go ahead and export the images by clicking on the “Save As Image…” button.

This will in turn ask the path in which the images have to be saved. By choosing the right path, you can save the images by giving them any name.

It is wiser to save the files in a separate folder as each page will be a different image. Saving them together might mix these images up with the other images.

Now that it has exported the pages as images, you can have a look at them by following the chosen path during the time of saving, which is the last step.

All the images are now in the path chosen by you. You can edit (most importantly crop) them as you wish from the editors that are available or a bulk software editor like ScanTailor.

These images will be like the ones you sould scan using this method or this.

PDF to Image Convertor for Mac

Since this way of converting the PDF to image is confined to windows, as a bonus, let us figure out this in this section of the article.

Let our first lookout be for Mac. Mac has an app that comes by default within the system. It is a pretty straightforward and under-rated app. Many of us don’t know about this powerful app that does many such kinds of jobs.

Preview

Open the Preview app by going to the App Launcher and searching for Preview. It will open a new window asking you to select a PDF from which you want to extract images.

Once the PDF opens, you have the pages of the PDF displayed. Go to a particular page, open the file, select “Export As” and select the format you want that particular PDF page to be exported as.

The app asks you for the path, where you have to select the path. This will be where the image is stored. You can open the image in any of your favorite image editors and start working on your purpose of the conversion.

The only limitation of this is that you can only convert a single page from the PDF. For you to convert multiple pages, there is another software that costs you a couple of dollars.

PDF to JPG – A Batch Converter

This app is pretty easy to use. This in fact works exactly how PDFill works. Let us see how.

1. Open the app
2. Either add the PDFs using the “+” button or by dragging and dropping
3. You can add any no. of PDFs
4. Select the options
5. The image format that the pages from the PDF have to be exported to
6. Select the quality of the image if it is JPG
7. Select the page range to be exported
8. Opt for the best resolution based on your purpose
9. You can even set the width and height. Do this only when you are sure about scaling and cropping
10. Click on the “Convert” or “Convert All” button to convert the PDFs to the images

This app is a better version of PDFill for the fact that it can handle multiple PDFs at a time. Images from each PDF will be stored in separate folders.

PDF to Image Convertor for Linux

This same thing can be achieved in Linux using the following software.

This is command-line software. I am sure people who would be using Linux would know how to use the terminal.

Poppler-Utils

Let us start the process by installing the software. Before that, there are two types that Linux is built on and two different ways to install it in each of these systems.

Debian/Apt based Linux distribution (Like Ubuntu and Mint)

sudo apt install poppler-utils

RedHat/Yum based Linux distribution (Like RedHat and Fedora)

sudo yum install poppler-utils

After the installation, there is only one simple command that is required.

pdftoppm -png test.pdf test

The command to the software we just installed is pdftoppm.

The next parameter that we pass is the format in which the images ought to be, in this case png.

The thrid parameter is the name of the PDF for which images are needed. In this case it is test.pdf, which is in the pwd (linux users will understand this).

The fourth and last parameter is the name of the destination file that will be exported on to the path provided there.

For more info on this command based tool, please follow this link. All the parameters are mentioned.

We have in this article tried to list out the tools to convert from PDF to Images. They are all moslty free with a single exception, which costs less than $2 only for the mac users wanting to convert bulk PDFs.