How to turn phone photos into a clean scan PDF

Photograph the pages, pull them square, clean up the lighting, and get one tidy PDF — without a scanner or an app.

Almost nobody owns a scanner any more, and almost everybody occasionally needs one: a signed form, a utility bill for proof of address, a stack of receipts, a page from a book. Phone photos are the obvious substitute, but a photo of a document looks like a photo — trapezoid edges, a shadow across the page, grey paper — where what you need is something that looks scanned.

Step-by-step

1. Photograph each page. From directly above, on a surface that contrasts with the paper, in the most even light you can find.
2. Open the tool. Go to Image Tools and choose "Scan to PDF". Drop in every page at once.
3. Put the corners on the page corners. Drag the four handles onto the actual corners of the paper. Everything outside them is cut away.
4. Straighten it. Rotate if a page came in sideways, and use the page arrows to work through the set.
5. Choose a look. "Document" is the usual choice: it lifts the paper towards white and deepens the text. "Black & white" gives the crisp high-contrast look of a photocopier; "Greyscale" and "Colour" leave more of the original.
6. Build the PDF. Preview a page first if you want to check the clean-up, then export at A4, Letter, or fitted to the page shape.

Why the corners matter

Placing the corners does more than crop. The tool uses them to compute a perspective transform, which pulls the photographed quadrilateral back into a true rectangle — the same maths that makes a page shot at an angle look flat and square rather than keystoned. Get the corners on the actual paper edges and a hurried photo comes out looking deliberate.

Getting a better result

• Avoid your own shadow. Light from the side rather than directly behind you; it is the single biggest improvement available.
• Fill the frame. More pixels on the page means sharper text after the transform.
• Turn the strength down for faint originals. Heavy clean-up can erase pencil, faint stamps and pale signatures — check the preview if the document has any.
• Keep colour when colour matters. Coloured stamps, highlighter and letterheads survive "Colour" mode; "Document" mode is for text you want to read.

Frequently asked questions

Is the document uploaded?

No. Every step — the perspective correction, the tone clean-up and the PDF assembly — happens in your browser. That matters when the thing you're scanning is a bank statement.

Can I scan several pages into one file?

Yes. Add all the photos, adjust each page, and the export produces a single multi-page PDF in the order shown.

Will the text be searchable?

No — the output is images of your pages, not recognised text. There is no OCR step, so the PDF looks right but cannot be searched. If you need searchable text, run the scan through an OCR tool afterwards.