Bloom

Bloom is what makes a sunset, neon sign, or window light feel lit rather than just bright. The AI image is flat where a real photo would glow. This node is the classic reshade-style bloom: pull the bright areas above a threshold, blur them, and add them back on top so highlights spill light into their surroundings. It's the cheapest way to add a heap of perceived quality to an image - no model, no upscaler, just light bleeding where it should.

How it works

Standard bloom pipeline: threshold decides what counts as a highlight (0–1, where 0.8 means "only the top 20% brightness gets to glow"), the bright pixels get gaussian-blurred by sigma, and the blurred glow is added back scaled by intensity. colored is the personality switch - on, you get reshade's colored bloom (the glow carries the highlight's color, which is what makes neon actually look neon); off, the glow is mostly white light, which reads as a bright dreamy haze.

use_sigma is the sneaky good knob: when it's on, sigma drives the blur width directly; when it's off, the blur is derived from intensity instead - so one slider does the work. opacity is the Photoshop-style final blend, your "how much of this effect is actually on the image" dial.

Inputs that matter

• threshold - where the glow starts. High (0.9) = only the brightest sparks glow; low (0.5) = soft dreamy light
• sigma - blur width of the glow. This is the "how far does the light spill" control
• intensity - how strong the glow is
• colored - colored vs. white glow
• opacity - final blend, 0–100

One IMAGE in, one IMAGE out.

Install

Ships in Photography Nodes:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/TrophiHunter/ComfyUI_Photography_Nodes

Restart and it's under TrophiHunter/Photography (ComfyUI Manager: "Photography Nodes"). Pure torch/PIL, no requirements.

Where people get burned

The classic mistake is threshold too low - everything above 0.5 glowing turns the image into a haze, because half the frame qualifies. Start at 0.8 and only dip below if you want fog. The other trap: bloom before sharpening or noise looks greasy, because the sharpener amplifies the glow's edges. Keep bloom early-ish in the optical chain and finish with grain. If you want the full anamorphic lens-flare treatment on top, the pack's Bloom Lens Flares node is the heavyweight sibling - this one is the everyday glow.