title: Photographing a problem category: Solving description: Lighting, angle, and framing tips for clean OCR every time. order: 2

Photographing a problem

OCR quality drives everything that follows. A blurry or skewed photo can turn a 7 into a 1 or drop a minus sign — and then the solver answers a different question. A few habits get you to clean text every time.

Lighting

• Use natural light when you can. A window at your back beats overhead fluorescents.
• Avoid harsh shadows. If your hand or phone casts a shadow on the page, shift sideways.
• Skip the flash on textbooks. Glossy paper reflects the flash and washes out characters. Daylight is almost always better.

Angle

Hold the camera parallel to the page, directly above the problem. If the photo looks like a trapezoid instead of a rectangle, retake it. The OCR engine can correct mild perspective skew, but more than about 15 degrees and accuracy drops fast.

Framing

• Crop to one problem at a time. If two exercises are on the same page, frame only the one you want.
• Leave a small margin of white space around the equation — about a finger's width on each side. This helps the engine find the bounding box.
• Avoid your fingers in frame. They confuse character segmentation.

What to do about handwriting

Handwritten math works, but neat handwriting works much better. A few tips:

• Use a dark pen on white paper, not pencil on lined paper.
• Make superscripts and subscripts clearly smaller — x^2 should not look like x2.
• Close the loops on 0, 6, 8, 9. Open loops get misread.

When OCR is wrong

After we read your photo we show you the parsed text before solving. If anything looks off, click the equation to edit. The solve uses your edits, not the raw OCR — so a 10-second correction here saves a wrong answer later.

Next, learn how to read the verification badge so you know when to trust the result.

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