Scanning a document with a phone and cleaning it up
The phone's built-in document scanner does most of the work, if you give it good light and a flat page. Here is how to get a clean scan, where the scanner lives on iPhone and Mac, and how to fix the shadows, marks and crooked edges afterwards.
Most people no longer own a scanner, and do not need one. An iPhone or iPad can scan a document well enough for almost any purpose — forms, receipts, letters, signed contracts — in seconds.
The difference between a scan that looks professional and one that looks like a photo of a piece of paper is mostly in the few seconds before you press the shutter.
Where the scanner is
The document scanner is built into several apps on iPhone and iPad:
Notes. In a note, tap the camera button (or the attachment button) and choose Scan Documents. Scans are saved in the note.
Files. In the Files app, tap the More button (three dots) and choose Scan Documents. The result is saved as a PDF in the folder you are viewing — often the most convenient place.
From your Mac. With Continuity Camera, right-click on the desktop or in a Finder folder and choose Import from iPhone or iPad → Scan Documents. Your phone opens the scanner, and the PDF lands directly on your Mac.
All three detect the page edges, correct the perspective and can scan multiple pages into one PDF.
Before you press the button
Light. Even, bright, indirect light. Daylight near a window, without direct sun, is ideal. Overhead lights directly above the page cast the shadow of your phone and hand onto it.
Contrast. A dark surface under a white page. The scanner finds edges far more reliably when the page stands out.
Flat. Press out folds. For a curled receipt, hold the corners down with something heavy but outside the frame.
Straight above. Hold the phone parallel to the page, centred. Perspective correction works, but it cannot restore detail that was too far away or at too steep an angle.
Steady. Let the scanner capture automatically once it has found the page, or tap and hold still.
Scanner settings
In the scanner, you can usually choose between Color, Grayscale, Black & White and Photo.
- Black & White gives the cleanest result for text documents — white background, black text — and the smallest files.
- Grayscale keeps pencil, faint text and stamps that Black & White might lose.
- Color for anything where colour matters — highlighted text, stamps, forms with coloured fields.
- Photo keeps the image as photographed, without document processing.
After scanning, tap a page to adjust the crop corners or rotate it.
Cleaning it up afterwards
Even good scans sometimes need work:
Shadows and uneven background. A grey gradient across the page, darker at one edge. Increasing brightness and contrast — or using levels to push the light greys to white — cleans the background without losing text.
Marks and specks. Dust, a thumb at the edge, a coffee ring. Paint over them with white on a white background, or crop them out.
Crooked pages. Rotate slightly, then crop.
Tight crop. Remove the dark surface around the page entirely; a thin dark border makes a scan look like a photograph.
Hiding information. Account numbers or signatures that should not be shared. Cover them with a solid white or black box — not a blur — on a copy of the scan, and export that as a new file.
Formats
- PDF for documents, especially multi-page ones. The scanner in Files and Notes produces PDFs directly.
- PNG for a single page with text, when you need an image.
- JPEG for photographs or colourful pages, where file size matters.
For forms you need to sign, the Markup tools in Files and Preview let you add a signature and text directly to the PDF.
What Miyu Paint Canvas does
Miyu Paint Canvas is Miyu's image editor for iPhone and iPad. On supported devices you can start from the camera or the document scanner, then crop, resize or draw — so the capture and the clean-up happen in one app. Import from Files or Photos works too, for scans made elsewhere.
The free tools cover the clean-up above for a single page: brushes and erasers for specks and marks, fills and selections for covering a region with solid white or black, crop for a tight frame. Export is PNG or JPEG up to 2048 pixels for free, without a watermark. Full access adds adjustments for shadows and contrast, layers so fixes stay separate from the original page, full-resolution export and advanced formats. It comes from a fourteen-day trial that you start yourself and that never renews into a charge, or a one-time Lifetime Unlock; Canvas purchases cover iPhone and iPad on the same Apple Account.
Document processing stays on your device — which matters for scans of private documents — with no app account, advertising, analytics or tracking.