LayerStyle: OuterGlow

Photoshop's Outer Glow layer style: a soft halo that radiates outward from your subject's edge, into the background rather than into the subject itself. Where Inner Glow gives you a luminous rim on the inside, Outer Glow gives you the classic "backlit" or "magic aura" look bleeding out around the shape.

Common uses: a rim-light effect around a character, a glowing sticker/logo look, sci-fi or fantasy energy effects, or just making text pop off a busy background with a soft halo. It's a heavier, more visible effect than Inner Glow by nature, since it's adding new content around the subject rather than brightening what's already there.

How it works

The mask defines the subject's edge. The node blooms a glow outward from that boundary - glow_range sets how far it reaches into the background, blur softens the falloff - using two colors: light_color for the hot, bright core near the edge, and glow_color for what it fades toward as it spreads out. The result blends onto the background at your chosen opacity and blend mode, so it can sit as a genuine additive glow (screen, linear dodge) or something more muted depending on what you pick.

The inputs and outputs that matter

• brightness (2–20, default 5) - glow intensity. The conservative default undersells what this effect can do; push it up for a real halo.
• glow_range (default 48) - how far the glow spreads outward from the edge.
• blur - softens the transition from glow to background.
• light_color / glow_color (hex, defaults #FFBF30 / #FE0000) - the two-tone glow.
• invert_mask (default true) - flip if the glow ends up inside the subject instead of around it.
• 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 with 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. Lives under 😺dzNodes → LayerStyle. No models needed.

Common issues & troubleshooting

Glow shows up inside the subject rather than around it. invert_mask - the same convention gotcha that hits every effect node in this pack, and here it swaps outer for inner glow, which is an obvious tell that something's flipped.

Glow doesn't spread as far as expected. glow_range controls the reach directly; a wider value plus a moderate blur gets you a proper halo instead of a thin edge line.

Halo looks flat or muddy instead of glowing. Check blend_mode. A halo effect wants an additive mode - screen or linear dodge(add) - to read as light; a multiply-family mode will darken the background around the subject instead, which looks like a dirty ring rather than a glow.

Node's not in your list. Pack import failure, not this node - LayerStyle's dependency chain is long, and a broken transformers/stray-TensorFlow combo is the classic way the entire pack fails to load together. There's an OuterGlow V2 in this pack too, same controls plus the fuller 30-mode blend list - the better default for new work.