How to fix a dark, shadowed or yellowed document photo

You took the picture in a hurry and now the page has a grey shadow across half of it, the paper looks yellow, or the bottom corner is too dark to read. The photo isn't necessarily ruined. Most of these problems can be fixed after the fact — as long as the text itself was in focus.

First, figure out which problem you have

Different problems need different fixes, and the "brighten" slider fixes almost none of them.

What you see	What's happening	What fixes it
A soft grey shape across part of the page	Your shadow, or the phone's	Shadow removal (evening out the light)
The whole page looks yellow or orange	Warm indoor light	Color correction / white balance
One side bright, one side dark	Light coming from one direction	Shadow removal, then B&W
Everything is dim and murky	Not enough light overall	Lighten, then sharpen
Text looks smeared, even zoomed in	Motion blur or missed focus	Nothing — retake the photo

The last row matters. Software can even out light and recover faint text that was captured, but it can't invent detail that the camera never recorded. If the text is smeared rather than just dark, retake it.

Why "brightness" alone doesn't work

Raising brightness lifts everything at once. The shadowed part gets lighter, but so does the already-bright part, which turns white and washes out the text there. What you actually want is to make the paper the same white everywhere while keeping the ink dark everywhere. That's what scanner filters do differently from a photo editor: they estimate what the background of the page looks like across the whole image and remove that variation, then make the text crisp.

Fixing it in CrunchFile

1. Open the Scan tool and upload the photo (or a PDF with several of them).
2. The page is found and straightened automatically. If a corner looks off, tap Crop corners and drag it.
3. Try the filters on the preview:
   • No Shadow for a shadow across the page — it evens out the lighting first.
   • Magic Scan for most mixed problems: shadow, yellow paper and dim corners together.
   • B&W Clean when you just need crisp black text on white, such as signed paperwork.
   • Lighten when the whole photo is simply too dark.
4. Zoom in on the hardest part — usually the shadowed corner or a signature — and pick the filter where that part is easiest to read.

With a multi-page document, the filter you choose applies to every page, so the whole packet looks consistent.

Yellow paper and colored stamps

Old receipts, thermal paper and carbon copies are often genuinely tinted, not just lit badly. A strong black-and-white filter will make them clean, but it will also turn colored stamps ("PAID", "RECEIVED") and highlighter grey. If the color carries meaning, use Color Enhance, which whitens the paper while keeping colored marks.

Avoiding it next time

• Don't stand between the light and the page. Overhead lights put your shadow right on the paper. Turn so the light comes from the side, or move the page.
• Use daylight when you can. Even, indirect daylight from a window is the best free light there is.
• Skip the flash on glossy paper — it makes a glare spot that no filter can recover.
• Hold the phone a little higher and zoom in slightly instead of leaning over the page; it moves your shadow out of the frame.

A thirty-second habit — step to the side, check for your shadow — saves a lot of fixing later.