How to scan documents with your phone so they look professional
A phone camera has more resolution than most office scanners. What makes phone scans look amateur is the light, the angle and the background — all easy to fix.
Light: the most important thing
Use daylight from a window or an evenly lit room, and avoid the flash: it creates a bright spot in the middle and dark corners. The biggest enemy is your own shadow — stand so the light comes from the side, not from behind you.
Good scanning tools compensate for uneven light: CLEKARA's Scan to PDF estimates the lighting of each photo and evens it out, so the paper ends up white. But the less there is to fix, the sharper the text stays.
Angle and framing
Hold the phone parallel to the page, directly above it, so the page does not look like a trapezoid. Fill the frame with the page, leaving a thin border of the table around it, and put the paper on a darker surface so its edges stand out.
Tap the screen on the text before shooting so the camera focuses there, and keep still for a second.
Colour or black and white
For typed documents, contracts and receipts, black and white (or “Document” mode) gives the cleanest result and the smallest file. Use colour when there are stamps, signatures in blue ink, highlighted text or photos — in black and white a blue signature can become a faint grey.
Several pages in one file
Photograph all the pages first and then put them in order; it is faster than going back and forth. Each photo becomes a page, and placing them on A4 makes the PDF print correctly.
If the result is still too big to email, run it through Compress PDF: scans are exactly the kind of file that shrinks the most.