How to Straighten a Tilted Scan or Document Photo (Deskew)
Automatically detect the tilt of text lines in a scanned page or photo and rotate it straight, free and in your browser.
A page scanned slightly crooked, or a document photographed at an angle, looks untidy and is harder to read. Straightening it by eye with a rotate slider takes patience. The Deskew tool measures the angle for you.
Quick answer
Add the scan or photo; the tool detects the tilt of the text lines and rotates the picture to make it level. Download the corrected JPG. Nothing is uploaded.
How automatic deskew works
Text sits in horizontal lines. The tool tests many small angles and picks the one where the dark pixels line up in the sharpest rows. Rotating by the opposite of that angle makes the text level.
Best results
- Use a picture with plenty of text; photos with few lines give less certain results.
- Photograph on a plain background and with even light.
- Keep the whole page in the frame so rotation does not cut off text.
- If the tilt is more than about 15 degrees, rotate roughly by hand first.
Steps
- Open the tool and choose the scanned image.
- Wait for the angle to be detected.
- Check the preview and download.
Related fixes
- A page that is bent or in perspective (a photo from the side) needs perspective correction, which is a different operation; use the document scanner tool.
- For a PDF of scanned pages, use Deskew PDF.
- To then make text searchable, run OCR.
Privacy
Processing happens in your browser. The file is not sent anywhere.
