All Image Doctor filters have a split-screen preview—in this example, the right side of Susan’s face lacks the healing seen on the left.

Alien Skin has been making odd, offbeat plug-ins for Photoshop for years, and they’ve always been great fun. Image Doctor is more utilitarian than the company’s other plugs, delivering solid ability to quickly fix images plagued with excessive dust, dirt, scratches, JPEG degradation, and even bad acne problems. While it’s not the absolute last word in instant image repair, Image Doctor 2 often gets you 90 percent of the cure with a fraction of the medicinal effort.

Image Doctor 2 consists of five filters: Blemish Concealer, Dust & Scratch Remover, JPEG Repair, Skin Softener, and Smart Fill. All but JPEG Repair require that you start by making a selection of the area you want to process, then invoking the individual filter you want to apply. The interface is straightforward, with two primary modes of operation: Presets lets you quickly choose from a small list of optimized settings, while the Custom mode lets you get under the hood and tweak the controls manually.

If you spend a lot of time working with human faces and bodies, Blemish Concealer and Skin Softener are definitely the kinds of tools that will bring a smile to your face: just use the lasso tool to make selections around liver spots, scars, pimples, and any other dermal maladies, and like magic, they simply vanish, with a very natural continuation of surrounding skin tone and detail. One you’ve removed the big goobers, Skin Softener smooths everything over quite nicely, with very convincing results. While one could certainly argue that a talented Photoshop pro could do this type of work with the built-in tools, the speed and quality with which Blemish Concealer does its mojo is just fantastic.

The Smart Fill filter is designed to automatically fill larger selections of an image than the Blemish filter, so you can remove a car from a highway, or a plane from the sky, without any manual cloning work. The results we were able to achieve were a bit iffy at times, especially when trying to remove an object from a relatively complex background. It takes lots of trial and error to get decent results from this filter, begging the question of whether or not the same results can be achieved using tried-and-tested image cloning techniques with the Photoshop Clone tool.

On the other hand, Dust and Scratch Remover is definitely more capable than Photoshop’s own tool, producing noticeably smoother results, but we still felt it took too much time to deal with a seriously scratched image, and that other manual techniques were far more effective. Your mileage may vary.

Rounding out the suite is JPEG Repair, a potentially killer app designed to take seriously crunchy, low-quality JPEG pictures from the Web, and turn them into something useful for screen presentations, video, or limited print applications. While this plug-in can definitely make a JPEG look a little better, it’s not going to make fine wine out of grape juice. But there’s no built-in Photoshop equivalent to it, and anyone charged with repurposing undersized JPEG images will end up loving this thing. Sadly, JPEG Repair can only be used as a Smart Filter in Photoshop CS3; we’d love to see this limitation fixed in an update.

The bottom line. Image Doctor 2 is a great collection of tools for anyone involved in the daily touch-up of pictures, especially those of fellow human beings. While the list price is just a bit high, you’ll find it more palatably priced online, and the fully-functional 30-day demo on Alien Skin’s website will help you determine if this doctor is the cure for your image ills.

COMPANY: Alien Skin

CONTACT: www.alienskin.com

PRICE: $199; $99 upgrade

REQUIREMENTS: G5 or Intel CPU, Mac OS 10.4 or later, 1GB RAM, Adobe Photoshop CS2 or later, Elements 4.0.1 or later

Skin and blemish cleanup effects are excellent. Very easy to use. JPEG Repair delivers as promised. Universal binary.

Somewhat pricey. Smart Fill could be better. JPEG Repair only supports Photoshop CS3 Smart Filter.