- Drag it in, choose it, or paste it. It is read here in the tab and never uploaded.
- The settings column holds 5 controls for this tool. The defaults suit most files.
- “Clean up scan” works on your device, then Original and Result sit side by side with a download.
About Scan cleanup
Scan cleanup turns a phone photo of a page into a document: it warps the page back to a rectangle, evens out the lighting, takes the paper to white, and saves a PDF or an image.
A photograph of a page is never a scan: it is taken at an angle, so the page is a trapezium rather than a rectangle; it is lit from one side, so one edge is darker; and the paper comes out gray rather than white. This tool fixes all three in that order.
The corners of the page are found for you and shown as a quad you can drag, which is the part worth checking — the corners decide the whole geometry. The page is then warped back to a proper rectangle, the lighting is evened out across it, and the paper is taken to white with the ink left dark.
No shadow evens the light out and leaves everything else as photographed. Color keeps a photograph or a colored stamp. Gray is right for most printed pages, and Ink is that page with the paper taken to white and the ink hardened — the best thing to hand recognition. B&W makes the smallest file by far and is right for plain printed text and nothing else. Saved as a PDF, the result is a document rather than a picture; JPG and PNG are there when it is going somewhere that wants an image.