Make PDF Look Scanned
Make a PDF or a photo look scanned: grayscale, grain, softness, skew, yellowed paper and the edge shadow. Save as PDF or PNG. In your browser, no upload.
Drop a PDF or a picture here, or click to browse
🔒 Rendered entirely in your browser — your PDF is never uploaded.
Give a PDF the texture of a scan
Plenty of workflows still expect pages that look like paper rather than exports: a document assembled from a mix of scanned and generated pages, an archive where everything else came off a flatbed, or a handout that will be photocopied anyway. This tool rasterizes every page of a clean PDF — or a photo or screenshot you drop in, which becomes a one-page document first — applies an optional grayscale (photocopy) pass, softens the page the way a scanner lens does, sets how bright the lamp is so the copy comes back washed out, adds fine per-pixel grain, hardens the contrast, nudges each page a fraction of a degree off-square and lays down the shadow a sheet casts around its own edge, then rebuilds a new PDF from the processed page images. The skew is deterministic per page, so pages differ from one another instead of all leaning the same way. You can also yellow the paper, tilt the whole stack the way a feeder takes it in crooked, set how much of the glass the sheet covers and pick the scan resolution. Four presets — office scanner, colour scanner, photocopier, old fax machine — set every knob at once, a live before-and-after shows the result, and you can save the finished PDF or keep just the previewed page as a PNG.
What it is not for
The result is a new document that looks scanned. It is not a record of anything having been printed, signed or scanned, and it does not make one. Do not use it to present a file as an original, or to suggest a signature, stamp or date the document never had. Where authenticity matters, send the actual scan.
Private by design
Everything runs locally with pdf.js and pdf-lib — pages are rendered to a canvas, filtered and re-embedded entirely in your browser, so your document is never uploaded to a server.
Frequently asked questions
Does this add selectable text or OCR?
No — it replaces each page with a rasterized image, so the result looks scanned and has no selectable text, just like a real scan or photocopy. If you need searchable text, keep the original PDF.
Can I use this to pass a document off as an original?
No. The effect is cosmetic: it changes how a file looks, not what it is or where it came from. Using it to make a document appear to be something it is not — an original, a signed copy, a scan that was never made — is misrepresentation, and in many places illegal. Use it for appearance, never for provenance.
Is my PDF uploaded anywhere?
No. Pages are rendered and processed entirely in your browser with pdf.js and pdf-lib, so nothing is sent to a server.