Columns

The description of the product's features is simply wonderful: "Smart Fill seamlessly replaces large objects and defects. Repair large tears in heirloom photos. Remove signs and trash from landscapes, unwanted tourists from vacation snapshots and estranged persons from family photos."

My favourite part is "Remove estranged persons from family photos". We can all use some of that. I just had to try this one, so I found a happy group photo and anticipated how our beloved leader might prefer it to look in case the Iraq thing goes pear-shaped. Image Doctor did that in a single pass, and is capable of more besides; a little more fiddling in Paint Shop or Photoshop, and history is

ADVERTISEMENT

rewritten completely. Joseph Stalin - famous for Tipp-Exing his erstwhile rivals from the Kremlin group photos - would have loved it. Saddam Hussain is probably filling out the order form at www.alienskin.com as I type this.

One impressive feature of Image Doctor is that it can repair 'over-compressed' JPeg images, although it cannot exhume details that have been lost. It makes the process of invisible mending through assessment and interpolation simpler and faster than doing everything by hand, as in the picture of an eye here. Removing text from images - such as date codes and watermarks from TV image grabs - is almost pixel-perfect, as you can see from these stills of Hannibal. You can do this sort of thing by hand, but Image Doctor makes the judgement better than all but the most fastidious manual touch-up artist.

The UK distributor has edited the product description so it reads: "Smart Fill replaces large objects and defects, intelligently combining the repair with the background. Remove signs and trash from landscapes, unwanted tourists from vacation snapshots, and uninvited guests from party photos - without leaving seams."

Spoilsports! Nevertheless, this is neat stuff, well worth $99 (around £63.50) and perfect for the digital camera age.