Access Digital Photography

Image Doctor 2, from Alien Skin, is actually five Photoshop-compatible plug-ins in one package that are meant to “cure what ails” your “almost great” images. All of these utilities depend on your making a selection with any of the Photoshop selection tools first, then using one the five sub-programs to fix a specific type of program: Blemish Concealer, Dust & Scratch Remover, Skin Softener, JPEG Repair, or Smart Fill. Of course, you can use any or all of these on the same image, should you need to.

Smart Fill

If you’ve had any experience at all with retouching, you know how time-consuming and tedious it can be. If you’re a photographer competing for money in the real world, you know how important it is to get it right.

Photoshop itself has three tools, called the Healing Tools, that make retouching much easier than in the “days of yore,” but Alien Skin’s Image Doctor has a Smart Fill feature that’s kind of like having a cross between the Spot Healing tool and the Patch Tool. You just select an area to fix it, click on the area you want to fix it and wham-o, you’re done. It not only works on portraits, but can be a great way to get rid of trash on a lawn or ripped posters on a telephone pole.

Here’s an amazing example of the Smart Fill Feature in Action. I loved the way the scavenger birds grouped themselves in such a compositionally interesting way, but that out-of-focus branch at the top of the shot really bugged me. So I selected it very loosely with Photoshop’s Lasso Tool, choose Exposure 2 from the Filter Menu, and then clicked on all the choices in the dialog, waited for a few seconds, and saw the result of that choice. When I saw what I liked most, I left it that way. What you see below is the before and after of doing that…plus copying part of the sky and tree to a new layer, flipping it, and dragging it to the other side of the tree to make the “stray” branches and leaves come to life.

What I should have done for this particular image was use the other tab,  Basic. Also, this works most easily if you’re getting rid of something that’s surrounded by a pattern, such as the grass on a lawn or clouds in the sky. So to get the result I got here, I did a bit of “edge touchup” with Photoshop’s Clone Stamp. Worked out pretty nicely, as you can see.

Here’s the “before and after” of the image so you can see Image Doctor and I “repaired” my not-quite-perfect shot:

Skin Softener

This is the one of five “retouching tools” that I find myself using the most because, even at my ripe old age, I love photgraphing beautiful women and then “idealizing” them even more. This lady is a world traveler and extremely gifted photographer in her own right that I met in Panama some months ago. Frankly, I love her freckles and wrinkles for making her the “down to earth” person she is, but I also thought she’d be a good test for  Image Doctor.

First you select what you want to soften (and it doesn’t have to be skin, either…could be something like too many wrinkles in a background). I find it helps to feather the selection at times. Then you choose the Filter. The resulting dialog is really simple. You can grow or shrink the selection with one slider; intensify and minimize the softening with the other. There’s nothing to limit you to skin, either. You can add a softening effect to anything you select in any image.  Here’s the dialog:

Here’s the before and after of my photographer friend. What I really like about using this filter as opposed to the standard Photoshop method of selecting the skin and then raising it to a new layer and adding the blur, then masking any areas you want to keep sharp. Using this tool, you can select one area at a time and then repeat the filter on anything you select next by simply pressing Cmnd/Ctrl + F. Then if I want the effect in that particular area to be a little less intense, I can simply choose Edit > Fade and back the resulting slider down.

TIP: It’s a good idea to first get rid of big blemishes with either the Healing Tools in Photoshop or Image Doctor’s Blemish Concealer before you do the skin smoothing…just like it’s a good idea to do that in Photoshop as the step before you select the skin and raise it to a new layer to use with one of the Blur tools. That wasn’t done here, though, so that you could see what a great job this filter can do on its own.

Blemish Correction

This is actually a much more versatile capability than it’s name would imply. Notice, in the Before and After image, that it removed the necklace, too. Not that it needed removing, but I just wanted to see how good a job it could do with removing something larger than a skin blemish. I did have to repeat the command to get rid of that large blemish on her right cheek and I did the necklace at the same time so that I’d have more leeway with the sliders, helping them decide what to replace the necklace with. Still had to do some touch-up with the Stamp Tool, but it sure beat having to do the whole thing that way. Besides, if you really had the patience to build up an instinct as to how best set the adjustments you could probably do it much more efficiently. Here’s the before and after. BTW, just like in the image above, I used Alien Skin Bokeh to “loose” the background in a most attractive way.

Dust & Scratch Remover

The routine here is pretty much the same as for the above features. Dust was the biggest problem. I found that it worked best for me to make a Lasso selection around a fairly small area of spots or small imperfections…pretty much as I did with Blemish Correction…run the filter to make sure it worked for “blotches” of that size. Once I got the sliders working right, I’d just select a scratch or dust spot and press Cmnd/Ctrl + F. Moving around at 100% resolution and repeating this pretty much gets them all. If a few end up looking weird, it’s because they need different settings. Just leave them alone until you have all those that work fixed, then re-set the settings for one of the misbehaving patterns, get it right, and then repeat the process. It’s not nearly as hard as it sounds, because you don’t have to do painterly strokes and do them perfectly accurately. Just select a rough shape and hit a keystroke combination. If you try to remove a stain and it doesn’t do the whole job, just do the magic keystroke again. Most of the time, that fixes the problem.

After working it on individual spots until I knew they cleaned well, I discovered that I could usually press the Shift key and encircle another two or three well-separated areas and the same time before clicking to run the filter. That speeds things right along. What you see below is the end result. There were only a few instances…where the “glitch” was on a well-defined shape or man-made pattern where I had to resort to the Clone Stamp. Frankly, I haven’t been doing this long enough to know whether there’s a way around that. For right now, I’m really happy to have a tool that serves 90% of the problem for 90% of the images I need to fix.

JPEG Repair

Well, I have to tell you, I never shoot JPEGs…I won’t even buy a compact camera that doesn’t shoot RAW (which is why I haven’t yet bought one of those otherwise super-cool “everything proof” 10MP compacts…are you listening, Pentax?). Still, we call come across JPEGs from time to time that have bad cases of jaggies or fringing or noise.

The other side of the story is that I’ve been through a good many JPEGs from the “olden daze” and often have to try to make the best of JPEGs that other people send me. I don’t have one of those handy right now, but if I did, I’d be glad I had this utility.

Many programs will let you try to fix a JPEG, but they generally work on the entire image. In “real-life” JPEGs are usually at their worst along strongly contrasting edges and in the darker parts of the image. The big advantage you get here is that you get to use selections before you run the correction and you can use different settings for different selections…just like you can with the whole rest of the program.

One thing you should know upfront, though: Alien Skin strongly recommends not using these adjustments on JPEGs that have already been re-scaled, “corrected” in another program, or photoshopped. That’s why, since I don’t have such a JPEG at hand, you don’t see an example here.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 13th, 2009 at 9:30 pm and is filed under Digital Photography News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.