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 Alien Skin Image Doctor is not strictly speaking a noise remover, but is more suitable for repairing images by removing jpg artifacts, scratches and extra texture and softening the skin. The closest to noise reduction function is the jpg repair. Exactly this function of the reviewed tool was tested.
Image Doctor is a plug-in and can be found in Photoshop under filters menu. There, in the menu, you also choose which of the functions you will use at the instance.
Jpg repair opens in a new window. It has a rather classic interface with the preview taking most of the window on the right and settings and parameters set on two tabs on the left.
Above the preview you find a navigator and some navigation tools like zoom, move, and before/after switch. An interesting touch in the preview is the option of changing preview styles: you can view the changes applied to the whole image or its part in different configurations.
The preview scale is shown in the bottom right conner (I, personally, didn't think it convenient - the eye was continuously searching for those numbers in other places).
At the end of the workflow you can return the filtered image to the image editor by pressing OK or cancel the changes.
Now we return to the parameters of image repair used by the tool. There are only three of them: Deblocking amount (the degree of jpg artifacts removal), Blur amount (the very setting that influences the noise most), and Add grain slider. All the three can be controlled with a slider or by entering numbers into the corresponding fields.
Image Doctor offers its users a number of presets of the three parameters found in the Settings tab. You just choose one of the entries in the list and the settings are applied instantly. The users are allowed saving of their own presets by pressing Save. The new preset shows up in the list.
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Let’s now look at the results of the filtering Image Doctor performs.
As you can see Image doctor can only remove Luma noise from the images. Color noise remains, though not so pronounced after the blurring.
You can purchase Image Doctor at www.alienskin.com for $129, a 30 day fully functional demo version is also available for download.
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