Smartphones make it very easy to capture documents or notes – just point your camera, and tap – but the results aren’t always good, and may require some work later.

CyberLink YouSnap – Camera Scan to PDF is an Android app which can take photos of documents, screens, whiteboard presentations and more, automatically squaring them up, optimising image quality, and saving the results as a JPEG (free version) or PDF (paid, $2).

We installed and launched the app, and pointed our camera at a page of notes. One tap and few seconds later, YouSnap had taken the image, determined the orientation, rotated it and optimised brightness and contrast.

The app automatically corrects for lighting, skew and perspective

This worked perfectly for us, but if the optimised image isn’t to your liking then you can manually tweak the perspective correction and lighting, or convert the image to greyscale.

Once you’re happy, YouSnap gives you option to take more photos, maybe other pages of the same document. The free version of the app can then save all of these as separate JPEGs.

There’s also the option to share your shots as a single PDF via Facebook, email, wifi and more, although you can only use this once a day. Upgrade to the paid app and you’re able to save and share as many PDFs as you need.

We had a few issues with YouSnap. When we tried capturing two pages side by side, it only grabbed one of them. Images weren’t always as sharp as they could have been, and you can’t have the program automatically save documents as you go. CyberLink YouSnap – Camera Scan to PDF worked well for simple applications, though, and on balance it’s worth a few minutes of your time.