Clean Up a Scanned Document
Scans and phone photos of paperwork usually fail for the same reasons: a grey or yellowed background, speckles from dust on the scanner glass, and uneven lighting that leaves one corner darker than the rest. This tool runs three passes to fix that — a median filter to remove speckles, adaptive local contrast enhancement that treats each region of the page separately (so a shadow in one corner does not wash out the rest), and finally a threshold calculated from your specific image rather than a fixed cutoff. The result is crisp black text on a white background, which is both easier to read and usually a much smaller file.
Drag & drop your file here
or click to browse
JPEG, PNG, TIFF · Max 20MB
How it works
Upload your scanned document image.
The tool converts it to grayscale, removes noise, and applies contrast enhancement.
Download a clean, black-on-white version suitable for archiving or re-uploading.
Why use this tool
Old scanned documents often have gray backgrounds, speckles, or uneven contrast.
Cleaned documents are easier to read and more suitable for OCR.
Reduces file size by simplifying color information.
If the result is not what you expected
Parts of my text disappeared
Very faint writing — pencil, worn carbon copies, faded thermal receipts — can fall below the threshold and get treated as background. This tool is tuned for reasonably dark ink on light paper. For faint originals, try Sharpen Scanned Document instead, which enhances edges without forcing every pixel to pure black or white.
The output is black and white but I wanted to keep the colours
Converting to high-contrast monochrome is what this tool does — it is the standard for archived and submitted documents, and it is what makes the file small and legible. If you need to keep colour (a stamped seal, a highlighted passage, a signature in blue ink), use Fix Blurry Image Text, which sharpens without discarding colour information.
The background is still grey or blotchy
Heavy shadowing usually comes from the photo rather than the processing — a hand or phone casting a shadow across the page gives the algorithm genuinely ambiguous input. Re-photographing in even light, with the page flat and the camera directly above it, makes far more difference than any amount of post-processing.
My document is a PDF, not an image
This tool takes image files (JPEG, PNG, TIFF). For a scanned PDF, use Fix Blurry PDF, which renders each page, enhances it, and reassembles the document.
Frequently asked questions
- Yes. Cleaning up a scanned document converts it to a high-contrast grayscale output. This is the standard for archived documents.
- Yes. Any scanned document image works — receipts, contracts, letters, handwritten notes.
- This tool processes image files (JPEG, PNG, TIFF). For PDFs, use the Fix Blurry PDF tool instead.