Image Doctor

By Gary Coyne Monday, December 10, 2001.
Tags: Reviews � Graphics/Design �

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Provides: Variety of digital image repair functions as a filter in Photoshop
Developer: Alien Skin Software
Requirements: Adobe Photoshop 5.5 or later or Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0; OS 9.0 or later; OS X 10.1 or later (at least 64 Megabytes of physical RAM) (it also works in Windows)
Retail Price: $129, (sidegrade is $99-if you own another Alien Skin Software Product)

Like many filters for Photoshop, what Image Doctor can do can be done by any expert in Photoshop. But no expert can do what Image Doctor can do as efficiently.

I suppose I could stop the review right now, but it would only be fair for me to present some evidence for this grand claim.

The first option in Image Doctor is JPEG Repair. If you are unaware what JPEG artifacts are, all you have to do is to open a JPEG image and save it with a lot of compression. Open this image again and if you did a real good job of doing what you shouldn't do, you will see a lot of garbage floating around any dark object near a light object (like the sky). This can happen fairly easily if you have a digital camera and have it set for maximum compression, and then do some work in the image in Photoshop and then resave as a JPEG. Or you might be given a series of images by a client that were overly compressed.

Consider the following image that I did the best I could to make look bad. This image is magnified 200%.

After running JPEG Repair and fiddling with the controls for a few seconds, I brought the image to this:

Finally, bringing the image back to 100% we see this:

Next up was Scratch Remover, but truth be told, I have no images with a scratch, so I passed on testing this.

Then there is Smart Fill. Ever wanted to get rid of Uncle Henry? How about a car that got in the way? This latter incident did happen to me, I was taking photographs of an old California Mission and a car was in a shot and the driver was nowhere to be found. Below is the before (on the left) and the after (on the right)

As good a job as Image Doctor did, Smart Fill required the most amount of tweaking in the Smart Flow filter and in Photoshop. Most of how Image Doctor works can be seen quite easily by the following example. To initiate this process, I took the lasso tool and drew around the car. Then I opened up the Image Doctor filter. Below you see two close ups from within the Image Doctor window. On the left you see the image of the wall creeping into the area to the right. On the right you can see that by simply moving the left most active region to the right just a small bit, this drift of the wall disappeared. The way that Image Doctor works is to look at the image surrounding the area in question and sample from there to where you want the original image covered over.

As it turned out, I then had to fix what Image Doctor had done in Photoshop. Notice one can see in the image on the right, some of the right hand side of the vertical post was affected by the Image Doctor correction. Once back into Photoshop, I simply borrowed some of the straight edge from the wall and just copied it into place. I also found that by rubber stamping, I was able to remove the shadow of the car better than Image Doctor could.

The best thing about the removal of the car by Image Doctor was that it took about 15 minutes less time than it took me to do the same thing when I took this picture about a year and half ago. And it did a better job than I did.

Last is the Spot Lifter. I thought my spot remover worries were over when Adobe added the Healing Brush and Patch Tools with Photoshop 7. Then I saw Spot Lifter. Let me show you; look under the eye below.

When you are dealing with skin tones, wrinkles and general shading, it can be very difficult to remove things like spots because all too often you can remove too much. Here was a fairly subtle removal issue that by simply taking the Lasso tool and circling the problem, selecting the filter, and clicking OK, was gone.

Image Doctor is a very easy to use, very effective collection of filters for repairing problems in graphic images. Like all tools, there are times where it is the best tool to use and times where it isn't. And like Photoshop, you simply need to experiment around with it for a bit of time to recognize when it is the right tool. But if you charge by the hour, Image Doctor will pay for itself in very little time and if you do work with Photoshop (or Photoshop Elements) just for fun, Image Doctor will give you more time for fun.

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___________ Gary Coyne has been a scientific glassblower for over 30 years. He's been using Macs since 1985 (his first was a fat Mac) and has been writing reviews of Mac software and hardware since 1995.