Lens Flare Effect

Lens Flare does exactly what it says: it drops a flare on top of your image, picked from a library of presets, and composites it in with a blend mode. It's a post-processing node, not a generation one - it never touches your sampler, it just sits at the end of the graph and adds a light-optics effect to a finished render. If you've ever wanted that hazy, sun-through-the-lens look on a portrait or a cinematic shot without going back into Photoshop, this is what it's for.

Why you'd reach for it

Diffusion models are decent at implying bright light sources but bad at rendering the optical artifacts a real camera produces when it points near one - the streaks, the rainbow ghosting, the hexagonal aperture blobs. Getting a convincing flare out of a prompt alone is a coin flip. This node sidesteps that by not asking the model at all: it composites a rendered flare effect onto the image you already have, the same way a photographer or compositor would add one in post. It was added to the pack after the initial release - the author posted it as a follow-up drop with a "don't forget to update" note, which tells you it wasn't part of the original plan so much as something they wanted for their own renders and figured other people would too.

How it works

You pick a flare_type from a preset library - 21 of them, ranging from photographically-named ones like 50MM_PRIME, ANAMORPHIC_PRO, and VINTAGE_85MM (styled after real lens characteristics) to purely stylized options like GOBLIN, LASER, CYBERPUNK, and ETHEREAL. Worth knowing going in: those two groups look very different applied to a photoreal image, so match the flare family to the shot - a VINTAGE_85MM reads as natural on a portrait, LASER reads as a deliberate effect, not an accident of physics.

The blend_mode controls how the flare composites onto your base image - the default is screen, which is the standard way to layer a bright light effect without darkening anything underneath it (screen only ever brightens). Ten blend modes are available if screen isn't giving you the look you want - overlay, soft-light, add, color-dodge, and a few others.

Position, size, and rotation aren't separate number widgets on this node - going by the schema, they're driven by canvas_image, an internal field that stores where you've interacted with the node's own image preview. In practice that means you click (and likely drag) directly on the node to place the flare's origin point, the same on-canvas interaction style PaintPro uses elsewhere in this pack, rather than typing in X/Y coordinates.

Inputs and outputs

image is your source image. flare_type and blend_mode are the two settings you'll actually touch. Output is a single IMAGE - your original with the flare composited in - ready to feed into a Save Image node or further post-processing.

Installing it

Part of ComfyUI SKBundle, u/skbphy's personal node collection (they've been upfront that they're not a professional programmer and built the pack with Cursor AI's help, inspired by rgthree and mxToolkit). Through ComfyUI Manager, search ComfyUI SKBundle. Manually:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/SKBv0/ComfyUI_SKBundle.git
pip install -r requirements.txt

Restart ComfyUI. No model weights to fetch - the flare presets are rendered, not learned.

Common issues

Because size, rotation, and position live in an on-canvas interaction rather than a widget, the workflow feels different from most nodes at first - if you're used to every parameter being a slider or a number box, expect to click around on the node preview itself before it clicks (no pun intended) that positioning is interactive. If a flare looks washed out or barely visible, check the blend mode before assuming the flare itself is broken - screen on an already-bright image can vanish into the highlights; try overlay or add for more punch on high-key shots. And since this pack is thinly documented outside its README screenshots, the fastest way to learn what a given flare_type actually looks like is to drop the node, cycle through a few presets, and watch the preview - there's no lookup table for which of the 21 is which.