High resolution digital photos are great for most purposes, but can be a little cruel for portrait shots, where every skin imperfection is suddenly blown up in extreme detail.

Some photo editors have “beautifying” modules to help up clean such problems, or you can often fix them yourself with a little painting or clone work. And Free Photo Blemish Remover is another option, a specialist tool which can remove image imperfections with a click.

The program opens with a simple thumbnail browser at the base of the screen. Initially this points at your Pictures folder, but it’s easy enough to browse to some other location, then find and double-click on your target image to load it.

After that, it’s all very straightforward. Move your mouse cursor over the image and it turns into a small circle, representing the Blemish Remover. Position this over whatever you’d like to lose, optionally resize it with the mouse wheel to more precisely fit the area, click, and that’s it: Free Photo Blemish Remover instantly replaces the chosen area with a sample from a neighbouring part of the photo.

Point. Click. Fixed. (Sometimes.)

While this is essentially just a custom clone tool, it’s a reasonably flexible one. If you’re not happy with the results, for instance, you can click and drag either the selection or the sample areas to reposition them.

A separate Opacity slider applies a little transparency, perhaps helping to blend the sampled area into your image.

There are exposure, contrast and saturation tweaks available if you need them, along with simple Rotate and Flip tools, and the adjusted image can be saved when you’re done.

Free Photo Blemish Remover has a few annoying limitations. It doesn’t have a one-step undo (you can’t reverse your steps one at a time, only reset all of them to start again), and is only able to save images as JPEGs.

The program is extremely easy to use, though. Despite the name, it can be used to remove small unwanted objects or imperfections from almost any photo, and if you can’t do anything similar with your current image editor then it’s worth a try.