Turn photos of a page into a clean scan the portal will accept
A photograph of a page is grey, shadowed down one side, and four times the size it needs to be. This flattens the lighting, puts the paper back to white, and assembles the pages into one PDF, on your own device.
Photograph each page flat and from above, then drop them here.
Adaptive threshold against a local average, so a shadow across the page does not turn into a grey band
Black and white text, greyscale, or colour left alone
JPG, PNG, WEBP, and HEIC straight off an iPhone
One A4 or US Letter PDF, pages in the order you set
How to use it
- Photograph each page flat, from directly above, in the most even light you can find. That one step matters more than anything the tool does afterwards.
- Drop the photos in and drag them into page order.
- Pick black and white for ordinary text, which is smallest and sharpest, or colour if the page has a diagram that matters.
- Check the previews, then build the PDF.
Questions
How is this different from just putting the photos in a PDF?
Two things. The paper is forced back to white by comparing each pixel against the average brightness of the area around it rather than against one fixed number, which is what stops a shadow becoming a grey stripe. And the result is one bit per pixel in effect, so a page drops from about 3 MB to well under 100 KB.
My scan came out speckled.
That is the threshold biting too hard, usually on a page photographed in dim light. Raise the brightness slider a little, or switch to greyscale, which keeps the shading and still cleans up.
Does it straighten a photo taken at an angle?
It crops to the page and squares up what it can, but it does not do full perspective correction. Photographing from directly above rather than at a slant gives a much better result than any amount of correction afterwards.
Is my document uploaded?
No. The cleaning is canvas work in this page and the PDF is assembled here too. A photograph of your ID or your signed form never leaves the device.