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PDF Color Analyzer

Save money on printing by sending only the pages that need colour to a colour printer. The analyzer renders every page, measures how much of it is coloured, and gives you ready-to-paste page lists for colour and black-and-white printing. It also reports the colour spaces in the file – RGB, CMYK, ICC profiles and spot colours – which matters for professional printing.

  • Files stay on your device
  • No sign-up
  • Free to use

How to use PDF Color Analyzer

  1. Drop a PDF onto the page.
  2. Click “Analyse colours”.
  3. Copy the colour and black-and-white page lists.
  4. Paste them into the “Pages” field of your print dialog.

PDF Color Analyzer features

Per-page detection

Share of coloured area for every page.

Print lists

Compact ranges like 1-4, 9 ready to paste.

Tolerant

Ignores grey text, anti-aliasing and stray dots.

Colour spaces

RGB, CMYK, grey, ICC, Lab, indexed.

Spot colours

Named Separation and DeviceN inks.

Private

Rendered in your browser.

When to use PDF Color Analyzer

  • Splitting print jobs between colour and mono printers.
  • Estimating printing costs from copy shops.
  • Checking that a document is truly black and white.
  • Preflighting spot colours before offset printing.

PDF Color Analyzer FAQ

How is a colour page detected?

Each page is rendered at low resolution and pixels whose red, green and blue values differ noticeably are counted. Pages with more than about 0.2% coloured area count as colour.

Will a grey photo count as colour?

No, unless it has a tint. Pure greys have equal channel values.

Why is a page with a small logo marked colour?

Any visible colour makes a page a colour page for a printer. The table shows the coloured share so you can decide.

What are spot colours?

Named inks such as Pantone colours used in offset printing. Office printers simulate them with CMYK.

Can it convert pages to black and white?

Not this tool. Print colour pages in greyscale from your print dialog if colour is not needed.

Is my PDF uploaded?

No. Pages are rendered in your browser.

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Colour pages and colour spaces

Colour printing costs several times more per page than black and white, and many documents contain colour on only a few pages: a cover, a chart, a photo. Printing those pages in colour and the rest in black and white can cut costs considerably, but finding them by eye in a long document is tedious.

The analyzer renders each page and checks how much of it is coloured. Grey, black and white pixels have equal red, green and blue values; coloured pixels do not. A small threshold ignores the faint colour fringes that anti-aliasing produces around text, so ordinary black text does not make a page count as colour.

For professional printing, how colour is defined matters too. The tool scans the document’s colour spaces: device RGB is typical for documents made on screen, CMYK for print-ready files, ICC-based spaces carry calibrated profiles, and Separation or DeviceN spaces name spot inks.

The page lists use ranges in the format print dialogs accept, so you can paste them straight into the Pages field.

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