Live effects are organized into tabs in the sidebar next to the live view. Every tab is tunable while the camera is running, no need to leave the live session, and the whole stack (minus Presets itself) can be saved and recalled from the Presets tab.

Painting modes

Set in the Motion tab, separately for idle and while recording.

• None: no trail, the frame just shows the live camera feed.
• Continuous: paint accumulates and stays on screen until you reset.
• Decay: paint accumulates but trails fade out over time instead of staying on screen, with adjustable trail length, decay speed, un-draw speed, and a trail shape (Even, Soft Tail, or Sharp Tail).

Transform (symmetry)

Five symmetry modes, each with its own controls for folds, rotation, center point, spiral twist, hue-per-fold, radial zoom, auto-rotate, and wobble:

• Mirror, Kaleidoscope, Pinwheel, Mandala, and Tiling (grid of repeated tiles with adjustable columns/rows).

A stroke outline option switches strokes between neon-edge outlines and normal filled paint.

Motion (whole-canvas animation)

Beyond the trail behavior above, the Motion tab can animate the whole canvas while painting: Zoom or Gravity, with a direction (up, down, left, right, or spiral) and adjustable length/speed. A separate Wipe sub-tab controls what happens when you trigger a reset: Fade, Un-draw, or Rewind, with duration and auto-pause options, plus an optional auto-wipe when a recording ends.

Separation & Scene

Separation isolates the light painting from the rest of the scene, in Light mode (brightness-based, with light separation, softness, detail recovery, ambient preserve, and noise cleanup controls) or Color mode (keys a target hue with adjustable tolerance and minimum saturation).

Once Separation is active, Look, Transform, and Motion effects apply only to the isolated light, and the Scene tab unlocks separate effects for the background: dim, desaturate, blur, contrast, and tint (warm, cool, teal, rose, or green).

Drift

Dissolve or distort the paint over time with a named drift effect: Smoke, Wind, Ripple, Ember, Swirl, Bloom, Rise, Turbulence, Scatter (fly), Drip, or Vortex, each with its own parameters plus shared intensity, limit, ease curve, and fade-out controls. A painting mode must be selected in the Motion tab first.

Look

Color and post-processing effects: hue shift, chromatic trails, edge glow, pixelate, warp, chromatic aberration, vignette, invert/negative, an "apply to lights only" toggle, accumulation blend mode, and a Color Ramp with about 30 built-in gradient presets (Fire, Ice, Synthwave, Neon, and similar).

Shine

A source-based glow/star effect that detects bright points in the light and renders glints on top of them: effect type, threshold, minimum light size, max sources, radius, intensity, falloff, points, rotation/spin speed, color mode, blend mode, and optional trailing sparkle.

Watermark

A branded overlay with adjustable opacity, scale, position, spacing, and blend mode, on eligible plans.

Presets

Save the current combination of all the tabs above as a named preset, then recall it instantly during a live session. Presets can also auto-cycle sequentially or randomly instead of being triggered manually.

Why trails sometimes have gaps

Light trails are captured through your camera's rolling shutter sensor, which scans a frame from top row to bottom row rather than exposing it all at once. Between frames there's a short blanking interval where the sensor resets and captures nothing. Any light movement that happens during that blanking interval is never recorded, no pixel in any frame catches that position.

The faster a light source moves, the further it travels during each blanking interval, so the gaps in the trail get wider. This is a physical limitation of the capture process, not a software issue. At 25 fps the blanking interval is only a few milliseconds per frame, but that's still enough to miss a segment of a fast-moving light.