Image Doctor

The Image Doctor plug-in, as its name suggests, offers a range of tools to fix your digital images, and more specifically your photographs. But what does this application offer professional designers or image editors that Photoshop’s native tools cannot? Unfortunately the answer is not that much.

Image Doctor comprises four separate filters: Smart Fill, Scratch Remover, Spot Lifter and JPEG Repair. Smart Fill is an alternative to Photoshop’s Clone tool, which enables you to remove unwanted elements from photos while keeping the background intact. It’s one of those ‘magic’ filters – you simply make a selection of the object you wish to remove and Smart Fill does the rest. And it works pretty well. But a talented Clone tool artist could achieve the same effect in significantly less time.

Scratch Remover is convenient but it doesn’t offer anything better than Photoshop’s cloning tools, and Spot Lifter is basically an automated Healing Tool, which you can use on a new layer for non-destructive editing.

The best filter by far here is JPEG Repair, which does a good job of subtly repairing over-compressed files or files that are low-quality.

Image Doctor has an easy to use, intuitive slider-based interface, and its results are excellent – there’s no denying that. If you don’t feel confident using Photoshop’s own tools to repair images, Image Doctor offers a quick and neat solution. Its results are first-rate and its ease-of use makes image repair a doddle. So if you’re willing to part with your cash for that, Image Doctor is a worthy addition to your plug-in arsenal.