Enhance Scanned PDF.

Clean scan is the default profile. Background cleanup starts at 85 and ranges from 0 to 100. Increase it to reduce uneven paper shading, or lower it if pale content starts to disappear.

Gentle smoothing starts at 1 and ranges from 0 to 3. It softens small variations between similar neighboring pixels while avoiding strong edges. Shadow removal targets broad uneven lighting; border cleanup whitens only the outer 0-5% of the page; despeckling clears isolated dark pixels. These three controls start off. Check faint punctuation, Arabic dots, thin handwriting and marks near the edges against Show original before saving.

Black & white first reduces background shading, then separates dark ink from light paper using a threshold that adapts across the page. Ink strength ranges from 0 to 100 and starts at 50. Higher values retain more dark detail; lower values can reduce background specks but also thin faint strokes.

This profile produces black-and-white page images rather than grayscale. It suits many printed text scans, but removes color and continuous shades. Check small letters, diagrams and handwriting; use Clean scan or Colored notes when those shades or pen colors matter.

Colored notes reduces the page to a simplified paper-and-ink palette. Lightness threshold (%) starts at 25 and Color threshold (%) at 20; both range from 0 to 30. They control how differences in lightness and color are separated from the paper background.

Compare colored pen strokes, highlights and pale annotations as you adjust either threshold. This approach is intended for notes rather than photographic detail: gradients, photos and subtle shades can be flattened or lost. Clean scan is a better starting point for a mixture of text and images.

Only the current page is previewed on your device. Moving sliders or browsing pages does not upload the PDF or process the entire document. Use Show original to compare. The final 150/200/300-DPI rendering can differ slightly from the on-screen preview, so inspect the finished result as well.

With Apply to all pages off, changes belong to the current page, including its profile. Other pages keep their previous shared settings unless individually adjusted. Returning to a page restores its controls. Turning Apply to all pages on again copies the current page settings to every page and clears other page customizations.

Expand Pages to process to choose the output pages. A blank range includes every page; 3, 1-2 produces page 3 followed by pages 1 and 2. Settings follow original PDF page positions, not printed page numbers. Reset clears all page customizations and restores the default profile and sliders.

Start uploads the PDF and enhances the selected pages on our servers. Their physical page dimensions are retained. Black & white uses monochrome page images; the other profiles retain color. The file can be larger than the source: enhancement is not compression.

Selectable text, links and form fields are not retained as interactive content. Enhancement does not recognize text, straighten tilted pages or reconstruct missing detail. Keep your source; use Deskew PDF for tilted content and PDF OCR when you need recognized text.

Select Start when the settings are ready. On the result screen, Preview opens the generated PDF and Download saves a separate copy. Back returns to the current workspace; Start over clears it for a new file. Review small text, page edges and page order in the finished copy. A new PDF does not preserve the validity of an existing digital signature.