JPG Scan Cleaner

How to clean up a photographed document scan

A phone photo of a page has three problems: it is tilted, it is grey rather than white, and the contrast between ink and paper is low because of the ambient light. The cleanup addresses all three in one pass by finding the tilt, rotating the page, collapsing to luminance, and then stretching that luminance so the ink goes darker and the paper goes brighter.

Work the sliders in order. Fix the angle first so you are judging a straight page, then raise contrast until the text is crisp, then add whitening only if the paper still looks dirty. Whitening is the control that erases faint content, so it goes last.

• Drop in a JPG photo of the page.
• Leave auto-deskew on. It searches -6 to +6 degrees and reports the angle it found.
• If the page is still crooked, add manual rotation, which allows up to 15 degrees either way.
• Raise contrast until the text separates cleanly from the paper.
• Add whitening last, checking the preview for faint marks, then export the cleaned grayscale JPG.

How to clean a document photo

To clean a document photo, add your JPG to the scan cleaner, let auto deskew straighten the page, fine-tune the rotation if needed, apply paper whitening and contrast to lift the text, and export a cleaner JPG. The processing runs in your browser, so your document never leaves your device.

Phone photos of paper often come out tilted, with gray or yellow backgrounds and uneven lighting. Deskewing squares up the page, while whitening and contrast push the background toward white and make the text crisp, giving you a result that reads like a real scan rather than a snapshot.

Why it stays photo-to-JPG instead of PDF-first

Many people first need the document photo itself to look cleaner before moving on to OCR or PDF assembly, so cleaning the JPG is its own useful step rather than being bundled into a PDF builder.

By exporting another JPG, the cleaner fits naturally before any later step: you can clean the image here, then feed it into an image to PDF tool or a text recognizer. Keeping the scope tight makes the cleanup predictable and easy to redo.

Is the scan cleaner free and private?

Yes. The JPG scan cleaner is free with no sign-up, no watermark, and no usage limits.

It is private because deskew, cleanup, and export all happen locally in your browser. Your scan photo is never uploaded to a server, which matters for receipts, IDs, and personal paperwork.