Keep the page flat and the camera parallel

Perspective makes one side of the page smaller than the other. Put the paper on a flat surface and hold the phone as parallel to it as you can. If the page curves, gently flatten it rather than stretching the image afterward.

Use even light instead of maximum brightness

Window light or two soft light sources usually work better than a direct flash. Watch for a hand or phone shadow across the words, glossy reflections on receipts, and bright hotspots that erase thin strokes.

Leave the words large enough

Fill most of the frame with the text, but keep the whole line visible. For a long page, several readable crops can be more useful than one distant photo. OCRphoto accepts images up to 10 MB; a larger file is not necessarily a clearer file.

Try the photo-to-text tool

Once the image is sharp, upload it to photo to text. For a screenshot or exported image, image to text may be the more accurate starting point because the text usually has cleaner edges.