To scan a document with your phone, shoot straight down in even light, crop to the page, raise brightness and contrast, and convert the image to PDF. No scanner app is needed.
Step 1: Photograph the document
- Light the page evenly from the side so your shadow stays off it. Window daylight beats overhead lamps.
- Hold the phone parallel to the page. Tilting turns the page into a trapezoid and blurs the far edge.
- Fill the frame, leaving a small margin for cropping.
- Put white paper on a dark surface so the edges stand out.
Step 2: Crop to the page
Crop out the table, fingers and extra margin. Leftover background becomes part of the PDF page. The crop tool works locally in your browser.
Step 3: Adjust brightness and contrast
Cameras expose for the whole scene, so paper comes out grey. Raise brightness until the paper is white, then contrast until the text is dark. For text-only pages, black and white gives the cleanest scan and hides yellowed paper and uneven light. Use the filters tool or the one-step black & white converter. Keep color for ID cards, highlights, stamps and blue-ink signatures.
Step 4: Convert to PDF
Institutions expect PDFs, which fix the page size and print predictably. In the image-to-PDF converter, set:
- Page size: Letter or A4, so it prints like a normal document.
- Margin: modest looks like a scan; zero looks like a photo.
- Fit: "fit inside page" keeps the whole document, while "fill page" crops edges. Use fit.
Step 5: Combine multi-page documents
Convert each processed page to PDF, then combine them in order with the merge tool. Check the result in the page editor for duplicates or upside-down pages (delete and re-add them).
Keeping the file size reasonable
Full-resolution phone photos can make a few pages 10–20 MB, while upload portals often cap files at 5 or 10 MB. Downsize photos to 1,500–2,000 px on the long edge before converting; text stays crisp. See the guide to shrinking image files.