When crooked scans are worth straightening
Reach for deskew whenever a batch has gone through an automatic document feeder and the pages lean a degree or two, or when a phone photo of a page landed slightly askew. A visible tilt looks unprofessional in a shared report, but the bigger reason to fix it is machine readability: text-recognition engines expect horizontal baselines, so even a small slant drags accuracy down. If you plan to make a scan searchable, run deskew before anything else. It also helps when you intend to crop tightly, because a straight page lets you trim margins evenly instead of chasing a diagonal edge.