How to Scan Documents Properly With Just a Phone
Most "scanning" today happens with a phone camera rather than a dedicated scanner, and the difference between a scan that looks genuinely professional and one that looks like a crooked photo of a piece of paper comes down to a handful of simple habits.
Lighting: even and shadow-free
The single biggest factor in scan quality is lighting. A document photographed under a single overhead light or near a window often ends up with an uneven bright spot on one side and a shadow on the other. Diffuse, even lighting — near a window on an overcast day, or a couple of light sources from different angles — avoids harsh shadows and glare, especially glare off glossy paper, which can obscure text entirely in a photo.
Camera angle: directly overhead, not at a tilt
Photographing a document at an angle introduces perspective distortion — the page appears as a trapezoid rather than a clean rectangle, with text near the far edge smaller than text near the camera. Shooting straight down, with the camera parallel to the page, avoids this distortion and keeps text a consistent, readable size across the whole page. Many phone camera apps show a grid overlay that makes it easier to confirm the camera is actually level.
Filling the frame without cutting off edges
Get close enough that the document fills most of the frame (for better resolution on the actual content) while still leaving a small margin around all four edges, so nothing gets cropped off if the framing is slightly imperfect. A photo where part of the document falls outside the frame is a common, entirely avoidable mistake.
Cropping and combining multiple pages
After photographing, cropping tightly to just the document edges removes the background and any surrounding table or desk, producing a cleaner final image. If you're digitizing a multi-page document, photograph each page the same way and then combine them into a single file, so you end up with one document rather than a scattered set of individual photos.
Once photographed and cropped with Crop Image, JPG to PDF combines multiple page photos into a single PDF. If you'll need the text searchable or copyable later, run the result through OCR PDF to make it more than just a picture of text.