🔮 Kaleidoscope Effect

Kaleidoscope Effect is the "one image becomes a symmetrical mandala" node - it takes a slice of your image and mirrors it around a center point into a repeating pattern, the way a real kaleidoscope folds light through mirrors. Feed it anything with texture or color variation and it turns into psychedelic, fractal-adjacent art in one step. It's the kind of effect that's genuinely hard to get out of a sampler and trivially easy out of a mirror transform, which is why it exists.

It's the basic member of the pack's two kaleidoscope nodes: this one is the simple radial mirror; the "Advanced" variant adds pattern shapes and symmetry breaking. Start here.

How it works

The node takes your image, cuts out a triangular sector from the center (the wedge defined by facettes and the rotation), and then copies that wedge around the circle the number of times you set - but with a twist. The mirror_mode controls whether each copy is flipped: alternate mirrors every other copy so adjacent wedges mirror each other (the classic kaleidoscope look, and the default), all mirrors every copy, and none just rotates the same wedge without flipping. The copies are combined with a blend_mode - add (default, which brightens toward the center), max, average, or overlay - so the overlapping wedges interact instead of just stamping on top of each other.

fade_edges softens the wedge boundaries with a radial falloff so the seams between facets disappear, and color_shift rotates the hue of the base wedge before it's mirrored, which is the fastest way to take a pattern from "interesting" to "trippy."

The inputs that matter

• facettes (2–20, default 6) - number of mirror copies. 6 is the classic snowflake; 12+ gets dense and busy.
• mirror_mode - alternate (default), all, none.
• blend_mode - add, max, average, overlay.
• center_x / center_y (default 0.5) - the mirror point. Move it off-center for asymmetric mandalas.
• radius (0.1–2, default 1) - how much of the image feeds into the base wedge.
• rotation (0–360) - spins the whole pattern.
• fade_edges (on) - seam softening.
• color_shift (−1 to 1) - hue rotation on the source wedge.

Output is the mirrored IMAGE.

Installing it

Ships in ComfyUI-Image-Effects (Orion4D). ComfyUI Manager → search "Image Effects", or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/orion4d/ComfyUI-Image-Effects
cd ComfyUI-Image-Effects
pip install -r requirements.txt

Restart, then it's under Add Node → Image Effects. OpenCV does the masking and compositing - no models.

Gotchas

Pack-wide: only the first image of a batch is processed, CPU-bound. The one kaleidoscope-specific thing to know: the center of the pattern is the most mirrored region, so whatever sits at center_x/center_y gets repeated the hardest - put the most interesting detail there and the pattern blooms; put a face there and you get a many-faced horror (which, to be fair, is a great effect). If the result looks washed out, the add blend is stacking brightness - switch to max or average to keep the tone closer to the source.