Convert to PDF

Scan a document with the camera you already have

Photograph the pages and each one comes back flat, level and readable instead of a shadowed picture of paper. The photos stay on this device — a scanner app that uploads your passport is solving a different problem.

On this device

Photograph the pages

Add pages from the camera or from photos you already took. The first page becomes page one; the arrows move any page and work with a thumb, a mouse and a keyboard alike.

    Opened on this device · never transmitted

    What this tool does, exactly

    What it does
    Four corrections, in order: colour becomes luminance, the camera's uneven lighting is divided back out, every pixel is judged ink or paper against its own neighbourhood, and text running downhill is levelled. The lighting step comes first because a threshold on its own is what produces the black-corner result.
    Why it is not a filter
    The lighting is estimated over a window far wider than a letter, so the glyphs average away and what is left is the light on the page. That window is a fraction of the image rather than a fixed number of pixels, so the same photograph is corrected identically whether the phone shoots 12 megapixels or 2.
    What it does not do
    It does not read the text: the result is a picture of your page, not searchable characters, because that needs OCR. It does not find the paper's corners and crop to them, so frame the shot with a little room. And past about eight degrees a page is not crooked but deliberately rotated, so it is left as it is.

    About this tool

    Is this as good as a real scanner?

    For paperwork, close enough that the difference stops mattering: even lighting, level text, and a few hundred kilobytes instead of several megabytes. A flatbed still wins on anything you have to reproduce exactly — art, photographs, pages where the paper's own texture is the content.

    Do my photos get uploaded?

    No. The correction and the PDF are both built in this tab, by this device. That is the reason to use this rather than a scanner app: the documents people photograph are passports, payslips, contracts and bank letters, and those are exactly the files you do not want sitting on somebody else's server.

    Why do scanner apps leave a black corner, and does this?

    It should not, and avoiding it is the specific reason this tool exists. A simple filter picks one brightness cut for the whole image, so a corner in shadow falls below the cut and turns solid black. Here the lighting is measured across the page and divided out before anything is decided, so the shadowed corner and the sunlit edge end up the same white.

    Black and white, greyscale or colour?

    Black and white for ordinary paperwork — smallest file, most readable. Greyscale when the page carries photographs or shading worth keeping. Colour when the ink's colour is part of the meaning: a signature, a stamp, a highlighted clause. Every mode corrects the lighting; only the last keeps the hue.

    Can I use photos I already took?

    Yes, and it is often the better route: take the pictures with your normal camera app in good light, then add them here. Anything the browser can decode works, including HEIC on iPhone and iPad, because the decoding is done by the device rather than by a library we ship.

    More convert to pdf tools · All 11 · How they work