 <p>There have been numerous posts on here about trying to do OCR on camera generated images. The problem is not that the resolution is too low, but that its too high. I cannot find a link right now, but there was a question a year or so ago where in the end, if the image size was reduced by a factor of four or so, the OCR engine worked better. If you examine the image in Preview, what you want is the number of pixels per character to be say 16x16 or 32x32, not 256x256. Frankly I don't know the exact number but I'm sure you can research this and find posts from actual framework users telling you the best size.</p> <p><a href="http://stackoverflow.com/a/7775470/1633251">Here is a nice response</a> on how to best scale a large image (with a link to code).</p>