Product Reviews

Alien Skin is best known for its special effects Photoshop plug-ins - EyeCandy, Xenofex and Splat. But it's also responsible for Image Doctor, which has been newly upgraded with an enhanced feature set.

Image Doctor 2 addresses some of the basic issues faced by digital photographers, such as repairing over-compressed images, restoring damaged photographs, softening and concealing blemishes in faces, and removing unwanted elements from pictures.

Like other Alien Skin products, Image Doctor 2 consists of separate modules that can be applied to images independently. The most impressive of these is Smart Fill, which is capable of removing large, unwanted areas of images and replacing them with texture sampled from the remaining background. As with all but one of the Image Doctor 2 filters, it requires a selection to be made first, but this can be as simple as a rough Lasso outline traced around the target area. In our tests, Smart Fill performed beautifully with some images, and less well with others. It works best with random textured backgrounds, such as trees, grass, skin, and so on. If you're trying to remove an item that is in front of a five-bar gate, for instance, you'll find Smart Fill hard pressed to rebuild the original structure.

The Dust and Scratch Remover filter does exactly what it says - it seamlessly takes out scratches and other marks in scanned photographs, as well as other thin subjects, such as telephone lines in landscapes, scars on faces and date stamps on digital camera images. This filter also requires a selection, which is best made using QuickMask since the areas in question are generally too fine to be selected with a Lasso.

Using the Blemish Concealer filter is similar to the scratch removal technique, but it's optimised for taking out regions such as acne, scars, moles, birthmarks and other facial blemishes. The Skin

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Softener filter performs a smart blur effect on rough, oily, wrinkled, porous and otherwise imperfect skin - again, using a selection made by the user to determine where to perform the effect.

The final filter in the suite is Jpeg Repair, which addresses the 8 x 8 grid used for compressing images and restores some of the quality that can be lost by over-zealous compression. It performs a seemingly impossible task adequately, but can produce unwanted softening - the quality of the result depends very much on the type of image and the amount of degradation it exhibits.

Apart from Jpeg Repair, most of the tools in Image Doctor 2 can be reproduced to a large extent using the Healing tools built into Photoshop already - although Image Doctor does offer a more straightforward, intuitive approach. Version 2 brings greater speed of operation, support for Intel Macs, 16-bit images and multiprocessor systems, and a cleaned-up user interface.

The real problem is that it's frequently necessary to use several of the filters in conjunction with each other. When cleaning up a face, for instance, we might need to use Dust and Scratch remover to take out fine wrinkles, then Blemish Concealer to delete moles and larger irregularities, followed by Skin Softener to blend and smooth the results. And although it's possible to switch between filters from within the unified interface, only one tool at a time can be applied to an image. Users have to perform one filter, close the window, make a new selection and then apply a new filter in order to complete the task. What's needed here is an approach similar to Photoshop's Filter Gallery, which allows multiple filters to be combined while enabling each to be configured separately.

Although speeded up, Image Doctor 2 is still slow when working with large images, especially on the more complex operations. Sliders allow you to set the strength of the settings, but there's no visual feedback. For example, with Scratch Feature Size and Background Complexity both varying from 1 to 10, it's hard to judge what these numbers mean in the context of the image you are working on. And while a Preview Split feature enables you to view the before and after images using a variety of split-screen techniques, none allow you to see the same area of the image both before and after.

Image Doctor 2 can be both impressive in its results and frustrating to fine-tune. Use it for Smart Fill and dip into the other filters.