Guide
Making handwriting look scanned or photographed
By Ayush Nautiyal
Here is a thing that surprised me when I first started testing output on other people.
A page can have excellent per-letter variation, a drifting baseline, convincing ruling and the right ink, and still read as made rather than written. Not because of the handwriting. Because of the lighting.
Every handwritten page anybody has ever looked at on a screen arrived there through a scanner or a camera. Both leave marks. A perfectly even, perfectly white page with no shadow anywhere is a thing that has never existed outside a rendering.
That is what the paper finish control is for.
What a scanner actually does to a page
Put a sheet on a flatbed and four things happen to it.
The whites stop being white. Scanner sensors under-expose slightly and the paper comes back a few percent grey, flatter in contrast than it was.
A dark band appears down one edge. The lid does not press the page completely flat near the spine side, so a gap opens and the scan picks up shadow. On a page torn from a notebook it is very obvious.
Faint horizontal banding runs across the page. The scan head moves in steps and the exposure is not perfectly even between them.
And there is dust. Specks and short lint fibres on the glass, scanned along with the document, at whatever position they happened to be in.
The Scanned finish does all four. The grey wash and the edge band are composited in multiply so they darken what is underneath rather than sitting on top as a film. The banding is a one-pixel line every few rows, at about 5% opacity, placed by the same seeded generator everything else uses. The dust is roughly ninety specks and short fibres per page.
What a phone camera does instead
Different failures, and in some ways more obvious ones.
There is one light source and it is off to a side, so one corner of the page is brighter and warmer than the rest. Phone cameras also push warmth under indoor light, so the whole thing shifts yellow.
The edges fall off. Every lens vignettes, and phone lenses vignette noticeably.
The page is not flat on the desk. One edge lifts, and a soft shadow collects under it.
And there is sensor noise, which is visible on any indoor shot and much heavier than the grain in paper.
The Photo finish applies a warm radial highlight from a corner (which corner is chosen per page by the seed), a vignette falling to about 42% darkness at the extremes, a gradient shadow along the opposite edge, and about 1400 noise pixels.
The part that matters
Both effects are applied after the handwriting is drawn, not before.
This sounds like an implementation detail and it is the entire thing. The first version drew the shadow onto the paper and then wrote on top of it, and the result was unmistakably wrong even though nobody could immediately say why. The reason is that writing sitting at full brightness inside a dark vignette is physically impossible. Light does not skip the ink.
Compositing afterwards means the ink darkens in the vignette, warms in the highlight and picks up the grey wash exactly as the paper does. That is what makes it read as one photograph rather than two layers.
Which one to use
Clean for anything going to a printer. The printer adds its own paper and the room adds its own light. Pre-baking a vignette into a page you are about to print gives you a page with a vignette printed on it, which looks like a mistake, because it is one.
Scanned for uploads. If a page is going into a submission portal, a shared folder or an email, it is going to sit next to other documents that genuinely were scanned. A file that is conspicuously cleaner than everything around it stands out in the wrong direction.
Photo for anything casual. Social posts, mockups, a card you are sending a picture of, a journal page. It is the least formal of the three and the most obviously “a photograph of a thing”, which is sometimes exactly the impression you want.
Settings that pair well with it
The finishes change what the rest of the controls should be doing.
Under Scanned, drop the realism slider by five or ten points from wherever you had it. The scan texture adds its own visual noise, and the two stack. A page at 70 realism plus a scan finish reads as messier than either does alone.
Under Photo, go the other way on ink. The warm cast lightens everything, so pencil grey gets washed out to near-invisibility in the bright corner. Blue and black hold up.
Parchment and Kraft plus a Photo finish is a lot. Both already have warm texture; adding warm light on top pushes the page orange. Use Scanned on those, or Clean.
Ruled or Notebook paper plus Scanned is the most reliable combination for anything that needs to look like a real submitted document.
It stays stable
Both finishes draw from the same seeded generator as the handwriting, keyed to the page index. The dust lands in the same places every time, the highlight picks the same corner, the noise is identical.
This matters because the alternative is infuriating: you get a preview you like, hit export, and the file has different dust. Nothing here re-rolls between preview and download.
What it does not do
It does not rotate or skew the page. Real scans are usually a degree or two off square, and real photos are worse. That would mean cropping or padding the page, which breaks the exact A4 sizing that makes the PDF print correctly. The trade was not worth it.
It does not curl the paper or add a fold. Same reason.
And it will not turn an unconvincing page into a convincing one. If the handwriting underneath looks like a font, a scan texture on top looks like a font that has been scanned. Get the realism and the paper right first; the finish is the last five percent, not the first fifty.