Local Contrast Enhancement

Local Contrast Enhancement is an easy-to-use extension made for the Paint.net photo editing application, which facilitates three customization settings for enhancing the contrast of colors. It can be tackled not only by experienced graphic designers, but also by casual users.

How to set up and access

There is no installation pack involved. Instead, you can simply copy the downloaded DLL file to the "Effects" folder of Paint.net, whether it's an installer or portable version, restart the program if it was already launched, as well as locate and find the new add-on in the "Effects" menu of Paint.net. It's marked with a tiny icon that looks like a puzzle piece, which acts as an indicator for all Paint.net plugins that didn't come bundled with the image editor.

Apply contrast and tweak settings

The configuration panel of Local Contrast Enhancement has a clear-cut layout, revealing three sliders for the amount, radius and smoothing levels of the contrast effect. You can either move this slider until you get the desired setting, type the number, or click on two arrow buttons to increase or decrease this value.
During this time, you can keep an eye on the loaded photograph to preview the modifications. This way, you don't have to go through the trouble of applying changes just to be able to analyze the resulted image and undo the action or get rid of the last layer if you're not satisfied with the outcome.

Evaluation and conclusion

The picture was swiftly rendered during the preview in our tests. Although Local Contrast Enhancement hasn't been updated for a long time, it integrated with the latest edition of Paint.net without any issues in our tests. It didn't stop responding to commands. Thanks to its intuitive options, it can be easily configured.