Fix a faded PDF
Fading happens before the file exists. Thermal paper loses its print in a warm drawer, carbon copies were faint the day they were written, and each generation of photocopying throws away a little more of the original.
By the time it is a PDF, the fading is baked into the pixels. What can still be recovered is the difference between ink and paper, however small — and that is usually enough to make the document readable again.
Restore a faded PDF
Starts in Darken Text mode, which favours the ink and leaves the paper alone.
or drop a PDF here — up to 50 MB and 100 pages
Free to try • No signup required • Your file never leaves your device
Advanced settings
What can and cannot be recovered
If a stroke is even slightly darker than the paper around it, it can be pulled back towards black. That covers most faded documents: the information is still there, just compressed into a narrow band of greys.
If a stroke has reached exactly the same value as the paper, it is gone. Nothing recovers it, here or anywhere else — there is no signal left to amplify. In practice you will see this at the edges of very old thermal receipts, where the ends of lines simply stop.
Documents that respond well
- Thermal receipts and till rolls that have started to grey out.
- Carbon and NCR copies — delivery notes, order forms, prescription duplicates.
- Photocopies of photocopies, where each generation lost a little more.
- Pencil notes and annotations on otherwise printed pages.
- Old fax printouts, which start faint and fade further.
Why Darken Text rather than Print Ready
On a genuinely faded document the ink and the paper are close together. Aggressive background whitening risks crossing the line and erasing the faintest strokes along with the paper.
Darken Text keeps the background correction modest and puts the effort into the ink. The tone curve is also constrained so the white point can never drop onto the measured ink level, which is the specific failure mode that makes faint text disappear.
Keep the original
Enhancement is destructive in the sense that it discards tonal information you might want later. The tool never modifies your file — it writes a new one — so keep the original archived. For legal or historical documents, keep the untouched scan as the record and treat the enhanced version as a reading copy.
Questions
My document is faded in patches. Can it still be fixed?
Yes, and this is where local background estimation matters. The paper level is measured across the page rather than once for the whole page, so a patch that faded more than its surroundings is corrected against its own local background.
Can this recover a signature that has almost disappeared?
Often, partly. If any trace of the stroke is darker than the paper it will be pulled back. Keep Keep colour ticked — blue and black ink fade differently, and colour information helps a faint signature stand out.
Is the enhanced version acceptable as a legal record?
That depends entirely on who is receiving it, and it is their call, not ours. The enhanced file is a processed derivative, so keep the original scan alongside it.
Related
- Make a scanned PDF darkerMake scanned PDFs darker and easier to read. Corrects faint scans, grey backgrounds and uneven lighting from flatbed scanners and phone cameras.
- PDF contrast enhancerIncrease the contrast of a PDF online. Widen the gap between ink and paper so faint documents become readable and print clearly.
- Darken a PDFDarken a PDF online. Push faded grey text towards black, clean up grey paper and download a clearer PDF. Runs in your browser, no signup.