LayerFilter: SoftLight

This is the "make it glow" node. It gives you that soft, hazy, blooming-highlights look - the diffusion-filter / Orton-effect vibe where bright areas bleed a gentle halo and the whole image feels a little dreamy. It's the kind of finish people slap on portraits, fantasy scenes, and anything that wants to feel warm and cinematic rather than clinically sharp.

Reach for it as a late-stage grading step. A clean AI render can look a bit sterile; a touch of soft-light glow adds atmosphere and hides some of that plasticky over-sharpness for free. Like most glow effects, subtlety wins - a little reads as mood, a lot reads as a lens smeared with vaseline.

How it works

It builds a blurred, brightened version of your image and blends it back over the original, biased toward the highlights. The result is that bright regions spread and soften into their surroundings while the darks stay put, which is exactly what a physical diffusion filter does on a real lens. The threshold decides where the glow kicks in (how bright a pixel has to be to bloom), and soft controls the character of the spread.

The inputs and outputs that matter

• image (IMAGE) - what you're glowing up.
• soft (FLOAT, 0.2–10, default 1) - the softness/spread of the glow. This is the main dial. Around 1 is a natural haze; higher gets you a wider, dreamier bloom.
• threshold (INT, −255 to 255, default −10) - the brightness cutoff for what glows. Lower pulls more of the midtones into the effect (heavier, all-over glow); higher restricts it to just the brightest highlights (subtle sparkle).
• opacity (INT, 0–100, default 100) - how much of the glowed layer mixes over the original. Your restraint knob. Drop it to 40–70 if 100 is too much, which it often is.

Output is a single image to carry on down the graph.

How to install it

Via ComfyUI Manager: search ComfyUI Layer Style, install, restart. Manual:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/chflame163/ComfyUI_LayerStyle

Restart so requirements install. SoftLight is a pure filter - no models, no downloads.

Common issues & troubleshooting

A missing node here is almost always the pack failing to import, not the node. Look for IMPORT FAILED on ComfyUI_LayerStyle at startup. Across this pack, that traces to one of two things: a stale install from before it was split into ComfyUI_LayerStyle and ComfyUI_LayerStyle_Advanced (delete the old folder, reinstall clean), or a broken dependency in your Python environment - a botched transformers/tensorflow setup is the usual suspect - crashing the import chain. Reinstall through Manager and it typically resolves.

For the effect itself: if it blows out and washes everything into milk, your glow is eating the midtones - raise threshold so only real highlights bloom, and pull opacity down. If you can barely see it, lower threshold or raise soft. And a note of taste - this stacks. If you're also running a bloom or a separate diffusion pass, one glow node is plenty; two turns your image to soup.