A scan that arrives by email is rarely perfect. The paper came out grey, the text runs slightly uphill, there is a black band where the scanner lid did not close, or somebody photographed the page on a kitchen table and it sits at an angle. Printing it again is not an option, and the scanner app that could have fixed it is long gone. That is the gap this feature fills: cleaning up a scan after it has become a PDF.
Where to find it
Open the scan in EZ PDF Editor. Every PDF or scanned page has a gear icon on its thumbnail in the Pages panel, and the same gear sits on the ribbon above the page for the page you are on. Click it and the Adjust Page panel opens.
The panel floats beside the page instead of covering it with a dark window, so you see every change on the real page as you make it. Drag it by its header if it sits over the part you are watching.
The one-click fixes
Enhance
Enhance reads the page's own paper and ink and sets Brightness and Contrast so the paper lands near white and the text near black. It lowers Saturation a little on yellowed paper. It does not hide what it did: the sliders move to the new values, so you can nudge them from there. It leaves a page alone if it looks like a photo or is empty, where brightening would do more harm than good.
Auto-straighten
Auto-straighten measures the angle of the lines of text and levels the page. On a test scan tilted 4°, it found the tilt and turned it back by exactly 4.0°. The Straighten slider does the same by hand, up to 15° either way, in tenths of a degree.
Remove dark edges
Scanners and phone photos often leave a black band along an edge. Remove dark edges finds those bands and trims them off as a crop. A band that sits at a slight angle is still caught.
Hold to compare
Hold Hold to compare down to see the original page, and let go to see your changes again.
Colour modes
- Original keeps the scan's colours.
- Greyscale removes colour, which also makes the file smaller.
- Clean document turns grey paper, shadows and uneven lighting white while keeping the ink dark. It compares each part of the page with the paper around it, so a shadow in one corner does not turn the whole page grey.
- Black & white makes every pixel either paper or ink, like a fax. It is crisp for printed text, but it can wash out a light blue signature or a coloured stamp, so check those.
The fine controls
Below the quick buttons are six sliders: Brightness, Contrast, Saturation, Opacity, White Border (a white frame around the page) and Image Shadow (a soft shadow along the edges).
Fix a document photographed at an angle
A phone photo of a sheet of paper is rarely square: the top edge is shorter than the bottom and the table shows around it. Fix perspective… opens the page in a window with four corner handles. Drag them onto the corners of the paper, or click Auto-detect to find them, then Apply. The sheet is squared up to fill the whole page and the table disappears.
Paint away smudges and hole punches
Whiteout brush… opens the page with a brush. Paint over a coffee ring, the dark circles of hole punches, a fax header or a stray pen mark and it turns white. Set the brush size, undo a stroke, or clear them all.
Clean up your scan now
Open the PDF, click the gear on a page, and press Enhance — free, private, nothing uploaded.
Open EZ PDF Editor →Fix every page at once
Scans come in stacks. Switch on Apply to all pages at the top of the panel and every slider and colour change goes to every PDF or scanned page in the document. The automatic buttons still work each page out for itself: Enhance picks brightness and contrast per page, Auto-straighten measures each page's own tilt, and Remove dark edges trims each page's own borders.
Undo works one action at a time. One Enhance across 20 pages is one undo step, and one Brightness drag is one more. Cancel puts every page back the way it was when you opened the panel.
What happens when you download
The downloaded PDF looks exactly like the screen. To guarantee that, an adjusted page is saved as a clean image of itself. On a scan nothing is lost, because a scan was an image already. Text boxes, signatures and images you placed on the page stay sharp and separate on top. The one thing to know: if you adjust a digital PDF page, that page's own text is no longer selectable in the download. To make a cleaned scan searchable, run OCR Pages after adjusting. OCR reads the straightened, cleaned page, which also improves its accuracy.
How this compares
| What you need | EZ PDF Editor | Typical online PDF editor | Scanner apps |
|---|---|---|---|
| Clean up a PDF that already exists | Yes | No — rotate and crop only | No — only while taking the photo |
| Straighten a tilted page | Yes, automatic or by hand | No | At capture |
| White paper / remove shadows | Yes — Clean document | No | At capture |
| Fix perspective | Yes, with Auto-detect | No | At capture |
| Apply to every page | Yes | — | Per photo |
| Files uploaded? | No, runs in your browser | Usually uploaded | Often synced to a cloud |
Once a scan looks right, you can rotate or crop individual pages, add bookmarks to it, or turn a page into editable text.