toolDocumentsfree
Prepare Images for Fax
Flatten, sharpen, and lay a photo of a document onto clean paper.
Drop images here, or
Photos of documents work — the tool flattens and sharpens them for fax.
Runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you paste is uploaded, logged, or stored.
How to use it
- Add photos or scans of the pages you need to fax.
- Keep auto-crop on so the document edges are found and the background trimmed.
- Pick grayscale for mixed content or black & white for pure text, and tune contrast.
- Build the fax-ready PDF and download it.
Why a phone photo faxes badly
Fax is a one-bit medium: every pixel is either black or white. A phone photo arrives with uneven lighting, a grey cast, shadows, and a background of whatever your desk looks like. Sent as-is it comes out muddy or half-black, because the gateway has to guess where to put the threshold.
What this tool does about it
- Finds the document's content bounds and crops away the surrounding desk.
- Places the crop onto a clean white Letter or A4 page at 150 dpi with a margin.
- Converts to grayscale or applies a hard black/white threshold you control.
- Boosts contrast so faint pencil and thin type survive the transmission.
Grayscale or black and white?
Use black and white for pure text and line drawings — it produces the crispest, smallest fax. Use grayscale when the page contains photographs or shaded diagrams that would turn into blobs under a hard threshold.
FAQ
- Are my images uploaded to a server?
- No. Every tool here decodes and re-encodes your file using your browser's own Canvas APIs. The image never leaves your device, which is also why it works offline once the page is loaded.
- Why 150 dpi?
- Standard fax resolution is roughly 204 × 196 dpi, and fine mode is not much higher. Rendering pages at 150 dpi keeps well within useful detail while keeping the PDF small enough to transmit quickly.
- The result is too dark or too light. What should I change?
- Adjust the black & white threshold first — it decides which grey values become black. Then use contrast to separate the ink from the paper, and brightness to correct an overall cast from poor lighting.
- Can this send the fax too?
- No. It produces a fax-ready PDF; you still need a fax service or machine to transmit it. Preparing the file properly is the part that determines whether it arrives legible.