Improve a document photo with contrast, grayscale or black-and-white settings. Check fine print and colored details before creating a scanned PDF.
Fix capture problems before editing
If your document photograph is hard to read, first check whether the problem comes from focus, lighting or the page angle. Retake a blurry image with the phone held steady. Move away from glare, flatten the sheet and make sure a hand is not casting a shadow over the text.
Appearance controls can change the brightness or color of existing pixels, but they cannot recover letters that were never captured clearly. A good original photo usually needs fewer adjustments than a dark image taken at an angle. Keep the original photo so you can compare important details after editing.
Compare the four appearance options
Original color preserves the colors in the working image. It is often the most useful starting point for a page with colored annotations, stamps or highlights. Enhanced contrast increases separation between lighter and darker areas; try it on pale printing, but inspect the result for lost detail.
Grayscale removes color while keeping a range of light and dark tones. Black & white uses a fixed threshold to turn pixels either black or white. That can produce a clean appearance for some bold printed pages, but faint pencil strokes, thin letters or shaded areas can disappear or become solid blocks.
Choose settings for the actual page
Select each page and compare its preview before settling on an appearance. A setting that works for a high-contrast typed letter may be unsuitable for a faint receipt. Pages in the same PDF can use different settings, so there is no need to force a single treatment on the entire document.
For a page containing handwriting, inspect small loops, punctuation and light strokes. For a chart, check that labels and colored categories remain understandable. If meaning depends on color, return to Original color. The scanner saves appearance changes automatically, and you can change the selection again without repeatedly applying the effect to the source pixels.
Check the exported PDF at reading size
Create and download the PDF, then open it in a viewer and zoom in enough to read the smallest text. Compare a pale area and a dark area with the original photograph. Watch for missing punctuation, merged letters and highlights that cover the writing beneath them.
The current scanner resizes images to a maximum 2,000-pixel longest edge and exports image-based PDF pages. It does not add OCR or turn photographed words into editable text. If the document remains unreadable, retake the photo instead of relying on stronger processing.