Image Doctor consists of four image repair utilities: 1) Smart Fill, 2) Scratch Remover, 3) Spot Lifter, and 4) JPEG Repair.

• Smart Fill 
  is designed to seamlessly remove and/or heal larger image defects.
• Scratch Remover 
  is a quick and powerful tool for repairing linear defects in your image.
• Spot Lifter 
  is for removing small, round defects in your images. It also works well on all sorts of skin blemishes.
• JPEG Repair 
  smoothes the blocky artifacts associated with highly compressed JPEG images.

Installation is simple, but you must have a Photoshop plug-in capable image editor. These include Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, Fireworks, Photopaint and PhotoImage 7.0. You must perform a separate installation for each of your applications that you wish to have this capability. The license agreement allows multiple installations of Image Doctor on a single computer; provided that each installation is for use with a different application. I could and did install to my Photoshop 6.0, but chose to actually use PhotoImpact 7.0 for this article. You will need to identify the application plug-in location before installing, and if using Windows 2000 or Windows XP you will need administrator privileges. The documentation that comes with the software is excellent and explains everything. I highly recommend reading the documentation before installing, and then again after some limited use and experimentation with the plug-in.

I used PhotoImage 7.0 as my image editor, and I used Snag-it to capture many of the images from my screen.This old slide from a 1986 vacation to the Tetons had acquired some bad water spots and dirt. And it did in a 4x6 print. I tried Spot lifter, and then Scratch Remover, before finally settling on Smart Fill to actually correct the problems. I spent about an hour learning to use the tool and experimenting with different applications and settings, before finally choosing the default Smart Fill option. Even so, it proved better to do several small area selections separately, each with a unique background color and/or texture. You use the Lasso tool in your image editor to select the specific area. Then select the appropriate plug-in tool. When the plug–in window opens you will see some possible parameters on the left that can be changed and a preview (on the right side if the window) of the affected area that displays the result. You can further tweak the effect in a huge preview that includes a before/after toggle, command menus, keyboard shortcuts, and undo capability limited only by your chosen image editor. 

The second picture I selected to test Image Doctor was a black and white photo my father has carried in his wallet for over sixty-five years. It was taken on his 16^th birthday, and there has been considerable wear and tear to the photo since then. For the last few years, I have been working on the family's genealogy. We have found only a couple of pictures of my dad’s mother, so of course I wanted to salvage this one. Again I used a combination of Scratch Remover, Spot Lifter, and Smart Fill. And again, Smart Fill was the most common best choice for the larger areas of damage.

The manual that was provided proved good enough, that I didn’t have to use any tech support. Therefore, I can’t comment on it, but the tool itself is one of the best image enhancement/repair tools I have used. Image Doctor delivers these effects in a clean, easy-to-use interface. It is the only plug-in filter set that I am aware of, to offer selection-based image repair. You can use the familiar selection tools of your image editor, to select, and then correct the problem area often in one pass. The intelligent pattern matching of Image Doctor’s Smart Fill makes it a perfect complement to your existing photo-editing tools. I checked with Best Buy and CompUSA, but they don’t stock it. You can order Image Doctor directly from Alien Skin Software for $129.00 full version or $99 for what they call a side-grade (i.e. you already have one of their other products). The price seemed high for a plug-in to me, but the product really produced.

Alien Skin listed the following minimum requirements (CPU, Ram, Disk storage, OS, other hardware) on their Web site: Windows: Pentium II-class processor or better, Windows 98/ME/2000/XP, At least 64 Megabytes or greater of physical RAM. In addition, I would suggest at least an 800 MHz CPU.

In general, I would also recommend selecting smaller rather than larger areas of the image to enhance. You will loose less detail and the operation will complete much faster. I did not have any broken JPEGS to repair, so I could not test that function, but based on how the other three functions worked, I would expect excellent results from it as well.

Vendor information

Alien Skin Software, LLC
1111 Haynes St., Suite 113
Raleigh, NC 27604-1305.
Phone: 1-888-921-SKIN
Fax: 1-919-832-4065.