Took a photo of a receipt, a form or a page and your own hand and phone cast a shadow right across it? Upload it to Recovoly and press one button. The shadow, the dark corners and the yellow lamp cast are removed, the text underneath comes back to full contrast - and your colours stay exactly as they were.
Hand shadow gone
Text underneath readable
Light evened out
Corner to corner
Colour kept
No forced black & white
Animated walkthrough of the AI Text Shadow Remover on a phone photo of a recipe with a hand-and-phone shadow.
1
click for the whole page - nothing to mark
3
quality levels, from quick to Enhanced
Full
colour kept - no forced black & white
multi-page files, merged back into one
To photograph a document you hold the phone over it - between the page and the light. The result is a dark patch exactly where you need to read, plus grey corners and a yellow tint from the room light.
The usual workarounds
With Recovoly
Switch between the views you'll use in the app - drag the compare handle across the hand shadow, put the two side by side, or flip between the original and the result.
Apple Crumble
Serves 6 · Prep 20 min · Bake 40 min
INGREDIENTS
METHOD
1.Heat the oven to 190°C / gas 5.
2.Slice the apples into a dish; toss
with the sugar and cinnamon.
3.Rub the butter into the flour until
it looks like breadcrumbs, then stir
in the demerara and salt.
4.Scatter over the apples and bake
for 35-40 minutes until golden.
Serve warm with custard or vanilla ice cream.
- 14 -
Apple Crumble
Serves 6 · Prep 20 min · Bake 40 min
INGREDIENTS
METHOD
1.Heat the oven to 190°C / gas 5.
2.Slice the apples into a dish; toss
with the sugar and cinnamon.
3.Rub the butter into the flour until
it looks like breadcrumbs, then stir
in the demerara and salt.
4.Scatter over the apples and bake
for 35-40 minutes until golden.
Serve warm with custard or vanilla ice cream.
- 14 -
Illustration. A phone photo of a printed recipe with the photographer's hand-and-phone shadow, a dark corner and a warm lamp cast.
No marking, no sliders, no editing skills.
Sign in to Recovoly and open the AI Text Shadow Remover. New? A free account takes a minute.
Straight from your phone - JPG, HEIC, PNG, WebP, TIFF - or a multi-page PDF.
Fast for light shadows, Standard for most photos, Enhanced for the darkest ones.
One click evens out the page. Compare, add a free finish if you like, and download.
The dark shape you cast over the page while holding the phone above it.
A bright hotspot on one side fading to murky grey on the other.
Hard daylight streaks and the shadow of a window frame across the text.
Vignetting that turns the edges of the page grey and the corners black.
The dark curve where a page bends into the spine of a book or binder.
Yellow from warm bulbs or blue from daylight, evened back to paper white.
Most "document mode" filters hide shadows by turning everything black and white - and take your stamps, signatures and photos with them. Recovoly removes the shadow itself, so the page keeps its real colours. Want a crisp black-and-white copy anyway? That's a free click afterwards.
Stamps & seals
Red and blue stamps keep their colour instead of turning into grey smudges.
Coloured ink
Blue signatures, red corrections and green highlighter stay exactly as written.
Photos & logos
Pictures and letterheads on the page aren't flattened to black and white.
Faint grey text
Light print and pencil aren't thrown away by a harsh black-and-white threshold.
The only setting there is. Every level costs the same 10 points per page.
Recommended
The right choice for most document photos: hand and phone shadows, a lamp on one side, greyish corners. Clean, evenly lit and natural.
Depth of shadow removal
Once the shadow is gone, the Enhance panel offers one-click finishes that cost nothing. Each adds a new version, so you can always undo.
Scanned B&W
Crisp black text on pure white, like an office scanner.
Free
Auto contrast
Stretch the tones so ink is darkest and paper is whitest.
Free
Black & white
Remove colour but keep every shade of grey.
Free
Reveal faint text
Boost faded ink and pencil until it's readable.
Free
Rotate
Turn the page upright in 90° steps.
Free
Expense claims and bookkeeping photos that the finance team can actually read.
Students and parents sending photos of assignments to teachers and apps.
Signed forms, school letters and official mail photographed to send on.
Study notes, textbook pages and journals snapped at a desk.
Family recipes and notes worth keeping, photographed in the kitchen light.
Documents that need to look like a clean scan before they go to the printer.
Upload a PDF of photographed pages - a contract, a set of receipts, a chapter of notes - pick the pages that need it, and each one is processed in turn. Download them merged back into one clean PDF.
Apple Crumble
Serves 6 · Prep 20 min · Bake 40 min
INGREDIENTS
METHOD
1.Heat the oven to 190°C / gas 5.
2.Slice the apples into a dish; toss
with the sugar and cinnamon.
3.Rub the butter into the flour until
it looks like breadcrumbs, then stir
in the demerara and salt.
4.Scatter over the apples and bake
for 35-40 minutes until golden.
Serve warm with custard or vanilla ice cream.
- 14 -
Apple Crumble
Serves 6 · Prep 20 min · Bake 40 min
INGREDIENTS
METHOD
1.Heat the oven to 190°C / gas 5.
2.Slice the apples into a dish; toss
with the sugar and cinnamon.
3.Rub the butter into the flour until
it looks like breadcrumbs, then stir
in the demerara and salt.
4.Scatter over the apples and bake
for 35-40 minutes until golden.
Serve warm with custard or vanilla ice cream.
- 14 -
Apple Crumble
Serves 6 · Prep 20 min · Bake 40 min
INGREDIENTS
METHOD
1.Heat the oven to 190°C / gas 5.
2.Slice the apples into a dish; toss
with the sugar and cinnamon.
3.Rub the butter into the flour until
it looks like breadcrumbs, then stir
in the demerara and salt.
4.Scatter over the apples and bake
for 35-40 minutes until golden.
Serve warm with custard or vanilla ice cream.
- 14 -
Five steps, every page, in one click.
The whole photo is analysed to find where light falls off and where shadows sit.
Ink and print are told apart from the darkness lying over them.
Shadowed areas are lifted to match the evenly lit parts of the page.
Words that were buried in shadow are brought back to normal contrast.
Text, layout and colours are kept; if there's no shadow, you get the original back.
| What you need | Recovoly | Scanner-app filter | Photo editor |
|---|---|---|---|
| Removes hand and phone shadows | Partly | By hand | |
| Keeps colour stamps, ink and photos | |||
| Text in the shadow made readable | Sometimes | Slow | |
| Works on photos you already took | |||
| Whole page in one click | |||
| Multi-page PDF in, merged PDF out | Varies | ||
| Free B&W, contrast & rotate afterwards | |||
| No editing skills needed |
A few habits give the AI more to work with - and when a shadow sneaks in anyway, it's one click to fix.
A window to one side casts far less shadow than a lamp directly overhead.
Keep it flat above the page so the text is evenly sharp and straight.
Flash creates a hot glare in the middle and dark edges - natural light is better.
Get the page edge to edge so more pixels go to the words, not the table.
A sharp photo with a shadow is fixable; a blurry one is much harder.
If half the page is in deep shadow, the extra recovery is worth it.
Log in to Recovoly, open the AI Text Shadow Remover and upload the photo or PDF. Choose a quality level - Fast, Standard or Enhanced - and press Remove text shadow. The whole page is evened out in one go: hand and phone shadows, dark corners and uneven light are removed, and the text inside them becomes readable. Compare with the original, then download.
No. The tool looks at the whole photo, finds the shadowed and unevenly lit areas itself and fixes them. There is nothing to draw or select - just pick a quality level and run it.
No. Shadows are removed without throwing away colour, so blue ink signatures, coloured stamps, highlighter, letterheads and photos stay as they are. If you do want a crisp black-and-white copy afterwards, the free Scanned B&W option is one click away in the Enhance panel.
Your own hand-and-phone shadow, shadows from lamps and windows, dark corners and vignetting, the soft shading of a curled page or book gutter, and warm or cool colour casts from indoor light. Text that was hard to read inside the shadow is brought back to normal contrast.
Fast gives a basic shadow cleanup and suits quick, light shadows. Standard is the recommended balance for most photos. Enhanced gives the best shadow removal and is the one to pick for very dark shadows, strong colour casts or pages you will print or send officially.
Yes. Upload the PDF, choose the pages, and each one is processed in turn. When they are done you can download them merged back into a single PDF.
The Enhance panel offers free one-click finishing: Black & white, Scanned B&W (crisp black text on white, like an office scanner), Auto contrast, Reveal faint text and rotation. Every option adds a new version, so you can always undo.
No. The tool is told to fix only shadows and uneven lighting and to leave everything else - the text, layout and colours - as it is. If a photo has no shadow to remove, the original is returned.
JPG, PNG, HEIC, WebP, TIFF and PDF - including photos straight from an iPhone or Android camera. Download the result as PNG, JPG or PDF.
Each page costs 10 points from your Recovoly balance, whichever quality level you choose. The Enhance options afterwards (Black & white, Scanned B&W, Auto contrast and others) are free.
Not exactly - you take the photo with whatever camera you like, and Recovoly cleans it up afterwards. That means it also works on photos you took weeks ago, ones someone sent you, or pages in a PDF.
Use side light from a window rather than an overhead lamp, hold the phone parallel to the page, turn the flash off and fill the frame with the page. Even so, a hand or phone shadow is hard to avoid - which is exactly what this tool is for.
Sharpen and clean up scans and document photos.
Lift stains, grime and age marks from whole pages.
Bring faded, washed-out words back to full strength.
Make old handwriting and manuscripts readable.
Mark one area of a page and restore only that area.
Plans and point packs.
Log in, upload the photo and get an evenly lit page in one click.
10 points per page · free finishing tools · see pricing
