Image Bloom Filter

Bloom is the effect you've seen in basically every game and a good chunk of cinematography without necessarily knowing its name: bright areas - a sunset, a lamp, a lens flare-adjacent highlight - bleed a soft glow into the pixels around them, instead of stopping at a hard edge. It's how real camera lenses and eyes behave when something's genuinely bright, and it reads as "cinematic" or "dreamy" largely because we're used to seeing it in exactly those contexts. Image Bloom Filter applies that effect to a generated image as a post-process.

Per the README, it's built as "a high-pass based bloom filter" - meaning the underlying method is a high-pass filter (isolating the bright, high-frequency detail in the image) used as the basis for where and how strongly the glow gets applied, rather than a from-scratch light-simulation approach.

How it works

It looks for the bright regions in the image via that high-pass approach, then blooms - softens and spreads - light out from those areas into their surroundings, brightening and diffusing the nearby pixels. The rest of the image, anywhere that isn't already bright, is left mostly untouched; bloom by definition only has something to work with where there's already strong highlight to bleed from.

What it takes and gives back

A single IMAGE in, a single IMAGE out with the bloom effect applied - the same shape as most of WAS's other image filters (Chromatic Aberration, SSDO, fDOF), so it slots into a filter chain after your generation the same way any of them do. Push it too hard and the image can start looking washed out or hazy rather than glowing - bloom is a "less is often more" effect, easy to overdo.

Where it's genuinely useful

Adding a cinematic or dreamy quality to a render that has genuine bright highlights to work with - sun through trees, neon signage, a bright window - where a hard-edged bright area currently reads as flat or artificial. It won't do much for an image that's evenly lit with no strong highlights, because there's nothing bright enough to bloom from.

How to install it

ComfyUI Manager: search "WAS Node Suite," install, restart. Manual:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/WASasquatch/was-node-suite-comfyui

then, from inside that folder, install requirements - path/to/ComfyUI/python_embeded/python.exe -s -m pip install -r requirements.txt on portable, pip install -r requirements.txt on system Python. Restart ComfyUI; it's under WAS Suite.

Common issues & troubleshooting

If the effect looks barely there, the image probably doesn't have strong enough highlights for the high-pass step to pick up much - bloom needs genuine bright spots to bleed from, and won't manufacture glow out of a flat, evenly-lit image. If it looks washed out or hazy instead of subtly glowing, that's usually the strength set too high; the effect is meant to be a light touch, not a fog filter.

This is a plain image filter with no external dependency of its own, so it's unlikely to break in isolation. The pack-wide risk still applies: WAS Node Suite has had no active development since December 2023, and the recurring complaint since then is the whole suite failing to import after a ComfyUI update - a shared-dependency version clash, not this node specifically. If it happens, reinstall requirements with your embedded Python interpreter, not a system one.