PDF Color Profile Analyzer
Detect every color space used across all pages of your PDF - DeviceRGB, DeviceCMYK, DeviceGray, ICC-based profiles, and spot colors. The pdf color profile analyzer flags pages that mix color models so you can fix them before printing, archiving, or submitting to a prepress workflow.
Color Space Legend
Upload a PDF to enable analysis
Upload a PDF to detect its color spaces
Why Use Our PDF Color Profile Analyzer?
Detect Every Color Space
The pdf color profile analyzer identifies all color spaces used in a PDF - DeviceRGB, DeviceCMYK, DeviceGray, ICC-based profiles, Lab, and spot colors - across every page in a single scan.
Per-Page Breakdown & Mix Warnings
See exactly which color spaces appear on each page. Mixed-color-space pages are flagged with a warning, which is critical for catching RGB images embedded in CMYK print documents.
100% Private - Runs in Your Browser
All color space analysis runs locally in your browser using client-side JavaScript. Your PDF never leaves your device, keeping confidential documents completely secure.
Instant Results, No Sign-Up
Upload any PDF and get a complete color profile report in seconds - no account required, no file size limit, and completely free to use as many times as you need.
Common Use Cases for PDF Color Profile Analyzer
Print Production Preflight
Verify that all pages in a print-ready PDF use CMYK color mode before sending to a print service provider - RGB pages will shift unpredictably during CMYK conversion on press.
RGB-to-CMYK Conversion Planning
Identify exactly which pages contain RGB or ICC-based profiles so you can target only those pages for color space conversion rather than re-processing the entire document.
Spot Color Verification
Confirm the presence of Pantone or other spot color separations in a document. Unexpected spot colors in a 4-color job add costly extra printing plates.
PDF/X Compliance Checks
PDF/X-1a requires all colors to be CMYK or spot. Use the pdf color profile analyzer to find non-conforming color spaces before PDF/X validation fails.
Mixed-Document Audits
Audit PDFs assembled from multiple sources that may mix RGB (screen-captured) content with CMYK (professionally designed) content on different pages.
Web-to-Print Quality Control
Catch customer-uploaded PDFs that contain sRGB images in an otherwise CMYK document before they enter the print workflow and cause color reproduction issues.
Understanding PDF Color Profiles
What is a PDF Color Profile?
A color profile (or color space) in a PDF defines how color values in the document should be interpreted and reproduced. PDFs can contain multiple color spaces simultaneously: DeviceRGB (screen-optimized, 3 channels), DeviceCMYK (print-optimized, 4 channels), DeviceGray (grayscale), ICCBased (tied to a specific ICC profile like sRGB or Adobe RGB 1998), Lab (device-independent perceptual space), and Separation/DeviceN (spot colors like Pantone). Mixing these in a single document can cause unpredictable color reproduction - especially when printing, where only CMYK and spot color separations are expected.
How Our PDF Color Profile Analyzer Works
- Upload:Drop your PDF into the tool. The color space resources are extracted from each page's content stream by rendering operators via pdfjs-dist, running entirely in your browser.
- Analyse:The tool scans every page's graphics state and image XObject dictionaries to detect all referenced color spaces, deduplicating identical spaces across pages.
- Report:A per-page table shows all color spaces detected on each page. Pages that use more than one color model (e.g., both DeviceRGB and DeviceCMYK) are flagged as "mixed" with an amber warning.
Color Spaces Detected
- DeviceRGB: Standard red-green-blue color space used in screen and digital content.
- DeviceCMYK: Cyan-magenta-yellow-black color space required for professional offset and digital printing.
- DeviceGray: Single-channel grayscale - common in scanned documents and black-and-white content.
- ICCBased / Lab / Spot: Profile-based, perceptual, and named separation color spaces including Pantone spot colors.
Accuracy Notes & Privacy
Color space detection reads the resources declared in each page's content stream. Some PDFs apply color spaces inline in image data or use indirect resource inheritance that may not be fully resolved client-side, so the analysis represents the declared resources rather than a pixel-level render audit. All processing runs locally in your browser - your PDF is never uploaded to any server, ensuring complete privacy.
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Frequently Asked Questions About PDF Color Profile Analyzer
The pdf color profile analyzer detects DeviceRGB, DeviceCMYK, DeviceGray, ICCBased (including sRGB and Adobe RGB profiles), Lab (L*a*b* perceptual space), Pattern, and Separation/DeviceN (spot colors including Pantone). All detected spaces are listed per page.
Print presses work in CMYK. When a PDF containing RGB images is sent to press, the RIP (raster image processor) converts those RGB values to CMYK using a conversion algorithm that may not match your intended colors. The result is often dull or shifted colors. Detecting mixed color spaces before print helps you fix them upstream.
A page is flagged as "mixed" when it references more than one device-level color model - for example, a page with DeviceCMYK text but DeviceRGB images. This is common in documents assembled from multiple sources. Mixed pages are highlighted in amber so you can decide whether to convert all elements to a single color space.
No. The entire pdf color profile analyzer runs locally in your browser using client-side JavaScript. Your PDF is never transmitted to any external server, keeping commercial and pre-press files completely private.
Yes. Spot colors are detected as Separation or DeviceN color spaces. The tool reports the color space type and, where the name is embedded in the PDF, displays the spot color name (e.g., "PANTONE 485 C").
The tool reports color spaces declared per page. It does not individually identify which specific image or graphic element uses each color space - it provides a page-level summary of all color spaces present. For element-level inspection, a professional prepress tool such as Acrobat Pro or a dedicated preflight solution is needed.
Yes, completely free. No registration, no file size limit, and no restrictions on how many PDFs you analyse.