Documents are about legibility, not beauty
The only thing that matters for a proof document is that every character can be read by whoever reviews it. That means resolution deserves priority over quality: a wide, slightly soft scan is far more readable than a narrow, crisp one where the small print has been reduced to grey mush.
Keep the width generous — fourteen hundred pixels or more across an A4 page — and let quality take the reduction. Text tolerates moderate compression well because it is high contrast, while it tolerates downscaling very badly.
Photographing paper properly
Place the document flat in even daylight, away from a window that casts a hard shadow across it. Shoot from directly overhead so the edges stay rectangular; a skewed photograph is harder to read and looks careless to a reviewer. Crop to the edges of the paper so none of the budget is spent on your desk.
Avoid the flash. It produces a bright hotspot in the middle and dark corners, and the hotspot can wash out printed text entirely.
Confirm the accepted formats and limits
The Aadhaar self service portal states its accepted file types and maximum sizes on the upload step, and these differ depending on whether you are updating an address, a name or a date of birth. Follow what that screen says at the time you are filing.
Questions
- My scanned document is unreadable after compression. What went wrong?
- Almost certainly the width was reduced too far. Small printed text needs pixels to exist at all, and once each character is only a few pixels tall no quality setting can recover it. Raise the maximum width substantially and lower the quality instead — that trade almost always favours readability.
- Should I upload documents as JPEG or PDF?
- Follow whatever the upload step accepts. Where JPEG is accepted, a single well cropped, evenly lit photograph per document is usually the simplest path. Where a multi page proof is involved, a PDF keeps the pages together, which reviewers find easier to work through.
- Is a colour scan required?
- Colour is generally safer for proof documents because it preserves the appearance of stamps, seals and coloured letterheads that help establish authenticity. Converting to greyscale to save space is a false economy here, since the file size gain is modest and the loss of visible detail is not.