How to Extract Text from an Image or Scan (OCR Tips)

Last updated: 26 October 2026

Optical character recognition (OCR) turns the text in a photo or scan into words you can copy, search and edit. Accuracy depends heavily on the image you start with — these tips make the difference between clean text and gibberish.

How OCR works

OCR software first cleans up the image, then finds lines of text, splits them into characters and matches each shape against what it has learned letters look like. Finally it uses language knowledge to correct likely mistakes. Anything that makes letters harder to see — blur, shadows, low contrast, skewed angles — makes every one of those steps less reliable.

Capturing a good image

• Use even, bright light and avoid shadows from your hand or phone.
• Hold the camera directly above the page so lines are straight, not at an angle.
• Fill the frame with the text, and make sure it is in sharp focus.
• For scanners, 300 DPI is the sweet spot for OCR; higher rarely helps.
• Crop away backgrounds such as desks and other pages before uploading.

What OCR handles well — and what it doesn't

Printed text in common fonts, receipts, book pages, letters and screenshots usually convert with very high accuracy. Handwriting, stylised display fonts, text on busy backgrounds and very small print are harder, and you should expect to correct some words.

After extraction

• Proofread numbers carefully — OCR can confuse 0 and O, 1 and l, or 5 and S.
• Paste the text into a word processor and use spell-check to catch remaining errors quickly.
• If you need an editable document that keeps the page layout, try PDF to Word on a text-based PDF instead.

Related tools

• Image to Text (OCR)
• PDF to Word Converter
• JPG to PDF Converter
• Compress Image