How to redact a PDF in about 30 seconds

Redacting a PDF should take seconds, not a trip through desktop software and a nervous double-check afterward. Here’s how to redact a PDF in Dress Docs, start to finish.

1. Drop the file

Open Dress Docs and drag your file onto the editor: a PDF or any image your browser can open (PNG, JPG, WebP…). It opens right away, inside your browser tab, and it’s never uploaded. Multi-page PDFs and multiple documents open in a sidebar so you can move between them.

2. Cover what shouldn’t show

Reach for the tools:

• Rectangle and ellipse to cover names, numbers, faces, or signatures. The default cover is solid black.
• Form-fill text to type clean replacement text over a field.
• Snip to export or copy just one part of a page.

Working through a long document? Copy a cover and paste it onto the next page, undo any step, and press ? to see every shortcut. Deciding what’s sensitive stays your call: you might keep the last four digits of an account number and cover the rest.

3. Download a clean file

Hit export. In that step, Dress Docs does the two things that make the redaction real:

• Flattens the page. Each page is exported as a flat image with your covers baked in, so the content under them is gone. It’s not a black box someone can peel off later.
• Removes the metadata. Hidden image data (EXIF/XMP) is dropped, and the PDF’s producer, dates, author, and hidden ID are wiped.

You get back a clean PDF, PNG, or JPG, saved straight to your device.

Free and Pro

The Free plan lets you work on up to 3 files at the same time. Pro removes that limit, adds customizable redaction styles, and lets you export your project and import it back into Dress Docs. On both plans, exports are flattened and free of metadata. See pricing.

Why flattening matters: a black box isn’t enough. What else the export removes: the metadata you forget to remove.

That’s the whole job: drop, cover, download. About thirty seconds, and the file never left your tab.