How To Scan A Document Using Your Phone

By Sabrina Sabino | Published: July 12, 2011

The following blog article was written by: Sabrina Sabino on July 12, 2011.

My scanner’s broken so I have to find alternatives. It is a little troublesome but nonetheless if you ever find yourself in such a sticky situation whereby you need a document scanned and don’t have the means to obtain a scanner in time, then the best method is to use your phone as a scanner.

There are several phone scanner apps out there that will scan the document and even identify the edges of the paper so you won’t get the background that you don’t need. But many of these softwares are not free. Obviously, I will show you the FREE way to do this.

I am on Nokia 5530, and the free application of my choice is PDF Scan. The app offers a 30-day trial, which is enough if you only need a few documents scanned ASAP. I’ve also tried scanR, but I can’t say it gives the best results. What these scanners do is play with the brightness of the object and removes the back shadow.

You know how sometimes you take pictures of documents and you have to stand at an angle so the shadow of your head and body doesn’t fall on the document? Phone scanner apps work well in the sense that you don’t have to worry about the shadow appearing on the document.

The following was taken from my phone’s camera (without flash):

Phone's Camera, No Flash

This one was taken using the PDF Scan app:

Camera PDF Scan App Enabled

Choose the one you think will come out better after image editing and cropping. For this example I’ll use the result from the phone scanner because the words seem to have come out sharper. First things first, rotate the image so it stands the way any document would. Then crop it and leave out parts you won’t need:

I’m using Adobe Photoshop to edit this, but you can use any image editing software if you don’t have Photoshop.