Turn a phone photo of a document into a cleaner scan — grayscale, shadow removal or black & white. Files never leave your device.

Everything runs on your device — there is no server, no account and no upload. Nothing is stored after you close the page.

What each mode does

• Shadow removed — estimates the local brightness of the paper and divides it out, so a shadow or uneven lighting across the page flattens towards white. The result is a natural, readable copy. Use the strength slider to soften or strengthen it.
• Grayscale — drops colour, keeping tone. Good for pencil notes, stamps and anything where colour is a distraction.
• Black & white — picks a threshold that best separates paper from ink and renders the page as crisp black on white. The threshold is chosen automatically; it suits typed or clearly printed text.
• Original — converts to JPG with no tone change, if you only wanted the format.

How it works

• Decode — your browser opens the photo with its own decoder.
• Estimate the background — a blur of the grayscale image stands in for the local paper brightness, the same idea used to whiten signatures elsewhere on this site.
• Normalise and render — each pixel is scaled against that estimate, then the mode you picked is applied — all on your device.

If you need to trim or square the page before cleaning it, use the image cropper; if you need to change the file size, the image compressor targets a size without changing pixel dimensions; to set exact dimensions, the image resizer does that without re-compressing for size. To change the format only, the WebP to JPG converter handles WebP and AVIF.

Tips for a good scan

• Fill the frame — get the page edges close to the sides so as much resolution as possible lands on the text.
• Even light beats bright light — a diffuse overhead light or daylight creates fewer hard shadows than a lamp to one side.
• Hold steady — sharpness cannot be added later; rest the phone or use a stand if the text is small.
• Straighten first — this tool cleans tone, not geometry, so fix a tilted page before you clean it.

Frequently asked questions

How do I turn a photo of a document into a scan?
Drop the photo into the tool, choose a mode (grayscale, shadow removed or black & white), and download the cleaned JPG. Everything runs in your browser, so the image is never uploaded.

Which mode should I choose?
Use grayscale for a natural, readable copy; shadow removed when the paper is unevenly lit or has a shadow across it; black & white when you want crisp text on clean white paper, such as for print or fax.

Is my document uploaded to a server?
No. The whole process runs on your device using your browser’s own canvas. Nothing is sent anywhere and nothing is stored after you close the page.

Does it straighten or crop a tilted page?
No. This tool cleans tone and shadow only. It does not straighten, crop or remove perspective — if the page is tilted, straighten the photo first, and use the image cropper to trim the edges.

Can it read the text (OCR)?
No. It produces a cleaner image, not searchable text. There is no OCR here; the output is a JPG you can read or upload.

Will it fix a very dark or blurry photo?
Only up to a point. Shadow removal brightens uneven lighting, but a photo that is underexposed or out of focus cannot be rescued by tone adjustment — retake it with more light and a steady hand.