Image Doctor 2 is a set of Photoshop filters that clean up visual defects in digital photos. It can be used to remove small things like pimples or moles, or it can be used to remove large things like the trash can that snuck into the photo. It can even make low quality JPEG images look better.

Image Doctor 2 is effectively five filters that reside in a sub menu off of Photoshop's Filter menu. The filters work on both 8 and 16 bit images which means that they will work on Raw images after they are loaded into Photoshop. They also will work in both Grayscale and RGB mode.

To run Image Doctor 2 you will need Adobe Photoshop CS2 (9.0.2) or later, Adobe Elements; 4.0.1 on the Mac, or 5.0 on Windows, Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 or later, or Adobe Fireworks CS3. While it may work on other programs, these are the only ones that it has been tested to work with. You will need 1024 MB Ram, 1024x768 monitor resolution, XP or later on PC or Mac OS X 10.4.0.

There are five filters in Image Doctor 2 and each takes care of a different aspect of image repair. The one thing that you will need to know how to do is make selections. In all but the JPEG repair, you must select that which you want to repair.

The complexity of the selection is directly proportional to complexity of the fix you want to make. If you have a flag pole that extends from the blue sky, through green trees, over a red car, over green grass, brown dirt, and is embedded into black asphalt then you will have to do a selection for each of these areas. Don't let this scare you though; it is really pretty easy once you get the hang of it.

Dust and Scratch Remover is what you will use to remove texture imperfections and defects in homogeneous textures. It is used to eliminate linear defects such as tears or creases, remove small text such as time stamps, or dust or other such remnants. The Scratch Remover avoids repetitive patterns that can result from directly cloning source textures. As with all of these fixes you can control the selection size with the contract/expand selection slider, you can specify the texture sample size, and define the background complexity.

Smart Fill is used to remove larger objects from images, or images with complex backgrounds like the flagpole example I used above. Smart Fill intelligently samples patches around the area to be removed and the tries to smoothly recombine the patches to create a contiguous background texture where the original image appeared. In the image below it was used to remove the flap of purple halter and the lead line that hangs off the right. The lead line was a little more difficult because in covered the ground image as well as the pink on the girl's shirt and therefore multiple selections had to be created to get a more seamless look.