Scanner Effect for Images
Turn a phone photo of a document or page into something that looks like it came out of an actual scanner or photocopier — flattened contrast, adjustable brightness, and a touch of grain, with presets for black & white, grayscale, or color.
Processing happens locally in your browser. Nothing you enter is uploaded.
How It Works
Choose a photo of a document or page. Pick a preset (Black & White Document, Grayscale Scan, or Color Photocopy) or adjust contrast, brightness and grain yourself. The preview updates instantly; download the result as a PNG.
Each pixel is converted to grayscale (luminance-weighted average of red/green/blue) when not in color mode, then contrast and brightness are remapped, random per-pixel grain is added, and — in black & white mode — each pixel is pushed fully black or fully white based on a brightness threshold.
Example
A slightly yellow-tinted phone photo of a printed page, run through the Black & White Document preset, becomes a crisp, high-contrast black-on-white image that looks like it came off a flatbed scanner.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Is my photo uploaded anywhere?
- No — every adjustment runs on your device using the Canvas API. The image never leaves your browser.
- What's the difference between the three presets?
- Black & White Document pushes every pixel to pure black or white (best for text pages). Grayscale Scan keeps intermediate gray tones (better for photos or documents with shading). Color Photocopy keeps color but flattens contrast slightly, mimicking a color copier.
- Can I straighten a crooked photo first?
- Not with this tool specifically — take the photo as straight-on as possible, or crop/rotate it with a photo editor first, then apply the scanner effect.
- Does this actually create a scanned PDF?
- It outputs a PNG image with a scanned look, not a multi-page PDF. To turn the result into a PDF, use the JPG/PNG to PDF tool afterward.
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