LayerStyle: InnerGlow

Photoshop's Inner Glow layer style: a soft light that radiates inward from your subject's edge, brightening the interior near the boundary rather than casting anything outward. It's the effect that gives cutout text or a masked object that faint rim-lit, almost-luminous look - like light is catching the inside edge of the shape.

You'll reach for it on text treatments, magical/glowing object effects, or any composite where the subject needs to feel like it's emitting or catching light right at its silhouette, without the harder look of an outer glow or a full re-light.

How it works

The mask defines the boundary. From that edge, the node blooms a glow inward, using glow_range to control how far it reaches into the shape and blur to soften the falloff. It gives you two colors rather than Photoshop's usual one: light_color typically reads as the hot, bright core of the glow right at the edge, and glow_color is what it fades toward as it spreads inward - a small but genuinely useful upgrade if you want a glow with its own color temperature shift instead of a flat single-hue bloom. The result blends onto the background at your chosen opacity and blend mode.

The inputs and outputs that matter

• brightness (2–20, default 5) - the intensity of the glow. Low is subtle; push it up for something closer to a full emissive edge.
• glow_range (default 48, -9999 to 9999) - how far inward the glow extends from the mask boundary.
• blur - softens the transition between the glow and the rest of the shape.
• light_color / glow_color (hex, defaults #FFBF30 / #FE0000) - the two-tone glow colors described above.
• invert_mask (default true) - flip if the glow lands on the background instead of inside your subject.
• background_image, layer_image, optional layer_mask, plus opacity and blend_mode (19 options on this node).

Output: a single composited image.

How to install it

Ships in the ComfyUI Layer Style pack. ComfyUI Manager → search ComfyUI Layer Style → install → restart. Manual:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/chflame163/ComfyUI_LayerStyle
pip install -r ComfyUI_LayerStyle/requirements.txt

then restart. Found under 😺dzNodes → LayerStyle. No models to download.

Common issues & troubleshooting

Glow shows up around the outside of the subject instead of inside. That's invert_mask - the pack's mask convention doesn't always match what an upstream node hands you, and this is the effect where the mistake is most obvious (you'll see an outer glow where you wanted an inner one). Toggle and re-run.

Effect barely reads at all. Push brightness up before touching anything else - the default of 5 is deliberately conservative. After that, check opacity and make sure blur hasn't smoothed the glow into nothing.

Glow looks like a flat colored ring instead of a soft bloom. Raise blur, and consider a smaller glow_range - a wide, hard-edged glow reads as a stroke, not a glow.

Node's not in your list. Pack import failure, not this node specifically. LayerStyle's dependency chain is long, and one broken library (transformers next to a stray TensorFlow install is the recurring culprit) takes the entire pack - every LayerStyle and LayerUtility node - down together. There's also an InnerGlow V2 in this pack with the same controls and a fuller 30-mode blend list, worth using for new work.