Images to PDF

Phone Camera Scans That Look Professional in PDF — What Makes the Difference

The gap between a phone-camera scan that looks professional in a PDF and one that looks amateurish comes down to three factors: perspective correction, resolution, and page size alignment. This tool handles the PDF assembly; understanding the first two makes the input images better before they arrive here.

Perspective: a phone held slightly off-center introduces keystone distortion — the top of the document appears narrower than the bottom. Most modern document scanner apps (Microsoft Lens, Apple Notes, Google Drive) detect document edges and apply automatic perspective correction. Use one of these apps to photograph documents rather than the plain camera app, which does no correction. Import the corrected images here.

Resolution: for a document page you intend to print or zoom into, aim for images where the long edge of the document spans at least 2480 pixels (equivalent to 300 DPI at A4 size). Images smaller than this will look blurry when the PDF is printed. Phone cameras at their full resolution are typically adequate — the mistake is applying heavy JPEG compression before conversion.

JPG vs. PNG for Document Scans — Which Compresses Better?

JPG and PNG compress differently, and the choice matters for file size:

• JPG: best for photographic content (color gradients, photos, mixed scans with images). Lossy compression, but at quality 85+ the artifacts are usually invisible. A 3000×2000 photo scanned page typically comes in at 500 KB–2 MB as JPG.
• PNG: best for documents with sharp edges, text, and solid colors (receipts, typed contracts, line drawings). PNG is lossless, so text stays crisp. However, PNG files for photographic content are larger than JPG — a photo that is 1 MB as JPG may be 8 MB as PNG.

This tool embeds JPGs as-is (no re-encoding) and embeds PNGs losslessly. If your source images are already optimally compressed, the output PDF will be as small as possible.

Page Size Options Explained

• A4: 210 × 297 mm. International standard. Required for most European and Asian submissions.
• Letter: 8.5 × 11 inches (215.9 × 279.4 mm). US standard. Required for US government, legal, and business documents.
• Auto (fit to image): each page in the PDF is exactly the image's aspect ratio at 72 DPI. No scaling, no white margins. Best for archiving photos where the page boundaries should match the image.

How to Use This Tool

1. Upload your JPG or PNG images. Multiple files can be selected at once.
2. Drag the thumbnails to set the page order.
3. Pick a page size and orientation.
4. Click "Create PDF" and download the result.