🗒️LC Lighting

Lighting is half of what makes an image read as real, and it's also the hardest thing to type well. "Good lighting" is useless; "soft window light from the front-left, golden hour, warm" is a photograph. 🗒️LC Lighting is the prompt-builder node that turns two dropdowns and a text box into a properly-worded lighting line - so you can describe light the way a photographer would without remembering the vocabulary every time.

How it works

Three inputs, one output. The lighting dropdown (18 options) picks the light quality and mood - soft ambient, golden hour, blue hour, overcast diffuse, studio softbox, rembrandt, split lighting, rim/hair light, and more. The light_direction dropdown (10 options) places the key light - front, front-left, side, above, below, back, or the three-point setup. The prompt text box is free-form extra notes. Each dropdown choice expands into a full, descriptive phrase, and the node joins your notes with the light quality and direction into a single prompt string.

The output is a STRING, so it feeds anywhere a prompt fragment goes: wire it into 🧩LC Prompt Assembler's lighting socket (that's the intended home), or into an LC Join Strings with the rest of your prompt, or straight into CLIP text encode.

Why it's worth it

The prompt-engineering playbook keeps hammering one finding: on modern LLM-encoded models, describing a scene the way a photographer would - light, lens, camera - is the highest-leverage phrasing there is. This node is that insight, canned. Instead of staring at a blank text box wondering how to say "hard side light with deep shadows," you pick "split lighting" + "side right" and get the full sentence. It won't write your prompt, but it removes the biggest blank you'd otherwise have to fill.

The knobs that matter

• lighting - the quality/mood. This is the one that carries most of the weight.
• light_direction - where the key sits. "Front-left" is the safe default; "three-point" is the studio answer.
• prompt - your extra notes: color temp, intensity, shadows, anything the presets don't cover.

Install

Part of ComfyUI LC123 Nodes (MIT, 89 nodes). ComfyUI Manager → search "ComfyUI LC123 Nodes", or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/lonecatone23/ComfyUI_LC123_nodes

Restart. No extra dependencies. On hosted platforms like RunningHub, request the pack and they install it for you.

Gotchas

The dropdowns are descriptive, not literal - picking "beauty dish" won't make a model understand beauty dishes, it'll emit the wording that describes one, and whether it lands depends on the model. And there's no "none" option on direction; if you don't want a direction in the prompt, leave the lighting node out of the chain rather than hoping an empty selection works. Small node, big chunk of your prompt-quality ceiling.