How to turn photos of paper into a clean scan
- Photograph properly
Flat surface, even light, camera parallel to the page, no shadow from your own head. Two minutes here saves every subsequent step.
- Add the photos in page order
Check the order in the list before you continue.
- Choose the clean-up
Greyscale for pen and pencil. Black and white only if the writing is firm - it will erase faint pencil. Colour if the answer depends on highlighter.
- Create and read it back
Open the result and read the faintest page. If anything has dropped out, step back to greyscale or colour.
Why this matters for exam and study documents
This is the tool for submitting handwritten work. A 30 MB folder of photographs becomes a 2 MB PDF that a portal will accept and a marker can actually read on screen.
What is kept, what changes, and what this will not do
Everything produced here is an image of a page. That is what makes it portable and what makes it unsearchable, and the two are the same property seen from different sides.
Kept
- Everything legible in the original photograph
- Page order
Changed
- Colour is removed unless you choose the colour setting
- Contrast is stretched, which can erase very faint pencil at the black-and-white setting
- Resolution is capped
- EXIF metadata, including location, is discarded
Limits
- This does not read handwriting. The result is an image of a page with no searchable text.
- It does not correct perspective. A photograph taken at an angle stays at an angle - hold the camera flat.
Questions and answers
My pencil writing disappeared. What happened?
The black-and-white setting applies a hard threshold, and faint pencil falls on the wrong side of it. Use greyscale, which keeps the full range of tone.
Can it straighten a photo taken at an angle?
No. Perspective correction needs to find the page corners reliably, and on a partly filled sheet of paper it frequently gets that wrong - which is worse than doing nothing. Photograph the page flat instead.
Will the marker be able to search my answers?
No. It is an image. Only optical character recognition would change that, and no current system reads handwriting reliably enough to trust with an exam script.
Why is black and white so much smaller?
A pure black-and-white image stores one bit per pixel instead of twenty-four. On text it compresses extraordinarily well.