Halation

Halation is the warm red-orange glow that bleeds out of bright areas in film photos - the light hits the film, scatters through the base layer, and exposes the neighboring emulsion. It's one of those analog tells that instantly sells "film photo" and that nobody can quite name until they see it. This node does exactly that: pulls the highlights, tints them warm, blurs, and adds the glow back. If you're chasing film emulation, this is the node that separates "a digital image with grain" from "looks developed."

How it works

It takes the luminance of the image, keeps only what's above threshold, and that becomes the halo source. The highlight color gets a red-leaning tint - the implementation multiplies the green and blue channels of the halo down to about 30% - then a big gaussian blur (blur_radius, up to 88) spreads it, and the blurred warm glow is added back scaled by intensity. The threshold scaling is the nice part: (luminance - threshold) / (1 - threshold) means brighter highlights glow proportionally more, so you get that graded, filmic response instead of a hard on/off bloom.

threshold here is 0–10 rather than 0–1 (default 0.8), and intensity runs 0–10 (default 0.5) - so unlike the pack's Bloom node, this one expects you to push intensity past 1 to really feel it.

Inputs that matter

• threshold - where the halo starts. 0.8 default is sensible; lower = more of the image glows
• intensity - how strong the warm spill is. The main dial
• blur_radius - how far the glow spreads. Big radius = soft dreamy halo, small = tight rim light

One IMAGE in, one IMAGE out.

Install

Part of Photography Nodes:

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

Restart, find it under TrophiHunter/Photography (ComfyUI Manager: "Photography Nodes"). No requirements, no models.

Where people get burned

Halation and Bloom are easy to confuse but they're not the same effect - bloom spreads the colored light of the highlight, halation specifically bleeds warm/red around it, and stacking both usually ends in orange mush. Use one or the other. Also, because the halo is warm-tinted, it reads as wrong on cool scenes unless you keep intensity low (0.3–0.6). And halation is an early-optical-chain effect: run it before grain, because grain over a soft glow ruins the film illusion it's built to sell.