# Clean Up a Whiteboard Photo

> Drop a whiteboard photo or take one with your camera. The board is auto-cropped and straightened, the uneven lighting — window glare, ceiling-light gradients, your own shadow — is flattened to a clean white, and the marker strokes come out darker and sharper than the original. Pick Soft, Standard, or Strong cleanup and download a PNG ready to share in the meeting notes.


Live tool: https://lofttools.com/tools/image-tools/whiteboard-cleanup

Category: Image Tools

## How it works

1. **Add the whiteboard photo** — Drop the photo or capture one with the camera. Angled shots are fine — the board is straightened automatically.
2. **Pick the cleanup strength** — Standard suits most boards. Strong wipes heavier shadows but can thin faint marker; Soft preserves pale colors.
3. **Download the clean image** — Compare before and after, then download a PNG with a pure-white background ready for the meeting notes.

## FAQ

### How does the shadow removal work?

The board's background brightness is estimated region by region, and each pixel is rescaled against it. A shadowed corner and a sunlit corner both end up the same clean white, while strokes — which differ from their local background — survive and get deepened.

### Do marker colors survive?

Yes — red, blue, and green markers keep their color. Very pale markers (yellow especially) can fade at Strong strength; drop to Soft if a color is disappearing.

### It cropped the wrong thing — what now?

Switch auto-crop off and the full frame is kept. Cropping only triggers when a large four-cornered outline is found, but a wall of picture frames can fool it.

## Tips

- **Stand square-ish, not perfect** — Auto-crop fixes perspective up to roughly 30 degrees of tilt. Just avoid your own shadow falling across the strokes.
- **Strong strength for sunlit rooms** — Harsh window gradients need Strong. If pale yellow marker starts vanishing, step back to Standard.
- **PNG keeps strokes crisp** — The download is PNG — no JPEG artifacts around the pen lines, and the white background compresses to almost nothing.

## Privacy — what we do not do

This tool runs entirely in the browser via WebAssembly. Your file never reaches a Loft Tools server. Specifically:

- **No upload.** The file bytes load into the browser tab's memory and process on your own CPU. Open DevTools → Network and observe zero outbound requests carrying file data while Clean Up a Whiteboard Photo runs.
- **No AI training on your file.** Loft does not train models. We could not train on a file we cannot see.
- **No content scanning.** No virus, copyright, or content-moderation pass against your file. The bytes are not accessible to us.
- **No server-side log of file contents, filenames, or EXIF metadata.** Cloudflare edge captures URL and truncated IP for abuse defense (standard CDN behaviour). Cloudflare Web Analytics records anonymous page hits, no cookies, no PII. Nothing about your file content reaches any log.
- **No retention.** Close the tab and the file leaves browser memory. No backups exist on our side because no copy ever existed on our side.
- **No account.** No email, no signup, no auth, no telemetry tied to you.
- **Offline-capable after first visit** (PWA). Once you've loaded a tool, it caches; later sessions work without internet. For high-sensitivity files, run the tool once online to warm the cache, then disconnect before processing.

Compare with upload-based services: each transmits your file to a processing server. Even over HTTPS, each has logs, retention windows, and subpoena exposure. Loft has none of these because the server architecture does not include your file.

## More

- All tools: https://lofttools.com/tools
- Category: https://lofttools.com/tools/image-tools
- LLM index: https://lofttools.com/llms.txt