Enhance a Document Photo Without Changing the Figures

A document is a grid of decisions

Body text, a table, a handwritten note, and a stamp are different risks. Printed type can look sharper and say something else. A table can move a decimal. Handwriting can become a printed letter the writer did not form. The stamp can gain rings that look official. None of that is acceptable if anyone will rely on the file. This tool does not OCR, does not make a searchable PDF, and does not certify a copy.

If you can put the page on a flatbed, do that, at optical resolution, and do not upload it here. The scanned-photo page is about photographs. A document wants contrast and a straight camera more than it wants a generative model. Keystone from a phone held at an angle is perspective. We do not correct it. Square the page in an editor, or reshoot it from above, before you ask for unblur.

Shadows in the gutter of a book are not noise to be deleted. Denoise can lift speckle in a gray page and can also eat a thin rule or a dotted leader. Look at a line of periods and at a hairline rule after the job. If they break, keep the original phone photo. Your eye can read through a shadow better than a model can invent a rule.

When a one-credit pass is still reasonable

A slightly soft overhead shot of a single page, for your own notes, can take unblur. One credit. Then read a paragraph you already know, a total in a table, and a name. One error and you stop. You may keep the file as a reminder and you may not hand it to someone as the document. Say which of those you are doing.

Do not 4× a page of body text. You will spend two Pro credits to enlarge errors. The free download of 3,200 px is already more than a page needs on a screen. A poster of a contract is a category error. Receipts for your records are the small case. Evidence for someone else is the case where you retype or rescan.

Handwriting wants even more restraint. Unblur can darken a pencil line and can also join two letters. If the note is the only copy of a measurement, transcribe it while looking at the original, then throw our result away if it disagrees. Colorize does not belong on a white page. A yellowed page is paper. Painting it white is not a mode we offer.

Privacy, because the page is the content

A document is often someone else’s private data or your own. Deletion after 24 hours is not permission to upload a page you do not have a reason to process. Do not send passports, medical pages, or a client’s financials through a convenience test. If you do have a reason, download what you need and expect the object to be gone tomorrow. We do not train on the upload.

Commercial use of a file you have rights to process is allowed on every plan. That sentence is not a right to republish someone else’s form. Free pages show ads. Pro and Studio are ad-free. A failed job returns the credit. A successful wrong total does not, which is another reason to read the total before you close the tab.

The API can run the same unblur. It is a bad place to build an unattended document pipeline, because nobody is reading the figures. If you automate this, you are automating a class of silent errors. The rate limit will not catch them. A human reading one page will. JPEG, PNG, WebP, and AVIF only. A PDF is not an image we decode. Export a page first.

A worked frame

A phone photo of a one-page invoice is slightly soft and slightly trapezoidal. Square it in an editor or reshoot from overhead before you spend a credit. Then unblur once and read three things you can check on the paper in your hand: the supplier’s name, the total, and one line quantity. Any mismatch and the WebP is trash, even if the page looks cleaner. Do not 4× it. Do not upload the PDF. Export a single image first, because a PDF is not a decoded format. Do not send a passport or a medical page through this test. Deletion after 24 hours is not a privacy program for documents you should not have uploaded. A gutter shadow on a book is not dust. If a dotted leader breaks, keep the phone photo and transcribe. We will not OCR the page, deskew it, or return a searchable PDF. The API will not either. One credit is a fair price for a recipe you can afford to misread and a bad price for a figure someone else will rely on. When the paper still exists, the scanner is the enhancer.