Light rays

Light rays is a plugin specifically built for Paint.net, which enables you to add light ray effects to your photographs while configuring several advanced settings. It's mostly geared toward experienced Paint.net users.

To get this app up and running, it's necessary to copy the downloaded DLL file to the "Effects" folder of Paint.net's installed directory. It also works if you have a portable edition of the image editor at hand.

If it's already launched, you have to restart it to apply the new changes and gain access to the new extension. The new plugin can be accessed from the "Render" submenu of the "Effects" menu. Because it doesn't have a built-in color picker, you have to choose the ray color and width from Paint.net's color docker window.

The main window has a standard appearance and neatly organized structure, showing sliders, boxes for entering numerical values, along with buttons to reset options to default for each customization feature. Worth noting is that the photo modifications can be previewed while making them.

It's possible to tweak the number of rays, center x and y offset (percent), length of the ray, internal radius, ratio of the rays, gradient radius, and random factor. The picture can be reseeded with one click. You can enable or disable anti-alias or filled mode in Light rays, along with alpha or color gradient, swap colors of the gradient, show the gradient as a ray, as well as use random rays.

Although Light rays hasn't received updates for a long time, Light rays successfully integrated with the latest edition of Paint.net in our tests. It didn't cause the graphic editing application to hang, crash or prompt error dialogs.