← All tools

Genuine redaction · not a cosmetic black box

Blackout Studio Runs in your browser

Most "redaction" tools just draw a black rectangle on top of your PDF — the text and image data are still there underneath, copy-pasteable in seconds. Blackout Studio rebuilds every page from pixels: what you cover is gone, not hidden.

✓ Files never leave your device ✓ Pixels destroyed, not just covered ✓ Redacting a single image is free
Your files are processed locally in this browser tab and are never uploaded to any server. How your data is handled

How real redaction works here

Drawing a black box over text on a PDF page and re-saving it does not delete the text — anyone can select it, copy it, or strip the box with basic tools. This app avoids that failure mode on purpose:

  1. Images — the picture is redrawn onto a canvas, the boxed pixels are overwritten with solid black, and only that new canvas is ever exported. The original pixel data is discarded.
  2. PDFs — every page is rasterized to an image first (so any hidden text layer, metadata or vector shapes underneath are left behind entirely), the boxes are burned into that image, and a brand-new PDF is assembled from the redacted images only.

Trade-off: redacted PDF pages are images, so text on them is no longer selectable or searchable — that's the price of a guarantee that nothing survives underneath a black box.

1 · Choose a file

Click to choose a file or drag one here

PNG, JPEG, WebP or PDF · processed entirely on this device

Drag on the page to draw a black-out box. Click an existing box to remove it.

Free: redact and export a single image with no limit. PDFs up to 5 pages export with a small watermark. The one-time license removes the watermark and lifts the page limit.