Pastel Effect

Pastel Effect is a small-sized plugin specially designed for Paint.net, which gives you the possibility to emphasize your photographs by applying a pastel effect.

This is done by reducing the numbers of colors to produce more light. The tool lets you configure a couple of settings, which are intuitive enough to be tackled even by users with no previous Paint.net experience.

There is no setup pack involved. Instead, you can copy the downloaded DLL file to the "Effects" directory in Paint.net's installed folder and restart the application if it was already running in the meantime. This also works if you have a portable edition of Paint.net.

From this point on, Pastel Effect can be accessed from the "Effects" menu. It should be indicated via a small icon that resembles a piece of puzzle.

The main panel is small and lists the two customizable options available. The pastel size and roughness of the effect can be established by moving a slider or by entering the numerical values. The rougher the image is, the bulkier it becomes. Any setting can be restored to default.

Another aspect worth noting is that you can preview changes made to the photo while making them, so it's not necessary to create a second layer just to be able to delete it if you're not pleased with the results.

Pastel Effect hasn't been updated for a long time and this is probably why we failed to get it up and running with the latest edition of Paint.net. It works smoothly with older versions, though. No errors popped up in our tests and it didn't hang or display any error messages.