Scan your pages into one clean PDF
Open Document Scanner →Set up in thirty seconds
- A dark, plain surface. White paper on a dark table makes the page edges obvious, which makes cropping easy and the result look like a real scan.
- Daylight. Sit near a window during the day. Indoor bulbs give a yellow tint and hard shadows.
- Flash off. Flash creates a bright patch in the middle and washes out stamps and signatures.
- Clean lens. Wipe it on your shirt. A greasy lens makes everything look foggy.
Taking each photo
- Hold the phone flat and parallel to the page, directly above it. If the page looks like a trapezium on screen, you are tilted.
- Fill the screen with the page but leave a thin border of table around it.
- Stand so the light is to your side, not behind you; otherwise your phone casts a shadow on the page.
- Tap on the text to focus, then hold still for a moment before taking the photo.
- Zoom in on the photo afterwards. If small print is not sharp, take it again.
Straighten, clean and combine
- Open Document Scanner and add all your page photos.
- Check that the four blue dots sit on the corners of each page. Drag any that are off. A photo taken at an angle comes out flat and rectangular.
- Choose Clean colour for most papers, or Black & white document for printed text. Both remove the grey cast and shadows.
- Put the pages in order with the arrows, page 1 at the top.
- Press Make scanned PDF and download.
Prefer to do it by hand? Crop each photo in Crop Image and combine them with JPG to PDF. The result is the same layout, without the straightening and shadow removal.
If a page comes out sideways, fix it with Rotate & Organize PDF. To add pages to a PDF you already have, combine them with Merge PDF.
Make it fit the upload limit
A PDF of three phone photos can easily be 4–6MB. In Document Scanner, open More options and type the limit before you make the PDF; all pages are squeezed evenly to fit. For a PDF you already have, use Compress PDF with Black & white ticked for text documents.
What about scanner apps?
Scanner apps straighten pages too. Many also add a watermark, push a subscription, or upload your documents to their cloud. If you use one, check its privacy settings. Document Scanner does the straightening in your browser, so nothing is installed and the pages stay on your phone.
Final check
- Every page is upright and in the right order.
- Your name, numbers, stamps and signatures are readable when you zoom in.
- There are no extra photos of the table or your fingers.
- The file is under the size limit.
- You have kept the original photos in case you need a clearer copy later.
Scan your pages into one clean PDF
Open Document Scanner →