Turn photos of notes and handouts into a clean PDF (document scan)
From phone photos of notes, handouts or receipts, the page is found, straightened and cleaned of shadows. Combine any number into one PDF.
Why these settings
A page photographed at an angle comes out as a trapezoid, with shadows from your hand or the lamp and paper that is whiter in some places than others. This fixes it in three steps. It takes the largest region brighter than the desk as the page and finds its four corners; it stretches those corners back into a rectangle; and it estimates the brightness of the paper at every point and divides by it, which removes shadows and uneven light.
There are four finishes. "Clean" makes the paper pure white and darkens the writing slightly — best for notes and print. "Color" keeps highlighter and coloured figures. "B&W" gives a photocopy look. "Original" only fixes the perspective.
Corner detection assumes the paper is brighter than what it lies on. White paper on a white desk, or a page that runs off the edge of the photo, can throw it off. Select the page and press "Scan adjust" to drag the four corners on the photo with your finger or mouse.
There is no text recognition (OCR): the result is a PDF of cleaned-up page images. And a page that is strongly curved — the middle of an open book — keeps its inner bend even with the corners set correctly.
Common questions
- Are my photos sent anywhere?
- No. Finding the corners, straightening and removing shadows all run on this device. No AI model is involved, so there is nothing to download first. The finished PDF is only written to your device when you press export.
- Can I combine many photos into one PDF?
- Yes. Select several photos and each becomes a corrected page. Reorder them with the arrows or by dragging, and remove the ones you do not need. Export writes all pages into a single PDF, each sized to fit A4 in the orientation of its photo.
- When do shadows not disappear?
- When the shadow is about as dark as the writing. The correction relies on the paper being bright and the strokes being thin to estimate the paper's brightness; a dark, wide shadow is too much to treat as paper and some grey remains. Shooting so the shadow falls elsewhere, or choosing the B&W finish, makes it far less visible.