Prompt Styler Time of Day

Lighting is most of what makes an image feel good, and the time of day is most of what sets the lighting. This node turns that into a dropdown: Sunrise, Morning, Midday, Afternoon, Golden Hour, Sunset, BlueHour, Evening, Twilight, Night, Midnight Reverie, and 19 more. Pick one and the node appends the light quality, color temperature, and shadow character of that hour.

It's part of wolfden's SDXL Prompt Styler pack, and it's one you'll actually reach for. Golden Hour on a portrait gives you that warm rim-light everyone chases; BlueHour gives cool, even, moody dusk; Night swings the whole palette dark and contrasty. These are exactly the kind of concrete lighting cues that steer a model well.

How it works

Each time-of-day is a JSON template - a prompt field with a {prompt} placeholder, and a negative_prompt. Your positive text drops into the placeholder, the lighting language wraps it, and the node hands back the finished string. Leave your negative blank to inherit the template's; type one and yours combines with it. Nothing runs in the node and nothing downloads - it's string templating, and the checkpoint you feed it does the rendering.

Lighting cues are among the more reliable things to prompt because they map to broad, physical levers the model handles well - warm vs. cool, hard vs. soft, bright vs. dim. So this node tends to land consistently.

The inputs and outputs that matter

• style - the hour. The node's purpose; 30 lighting states.
• text_positive - your subject and scene. The time of day relights it.
• text_negative - optional; blank uses the template's default, or add your own.

log_prompt (No/Yes) prints the assembled prompt to the console so you can see how, say, Golden Hour was phrased.

Outputs: positive_prompt_text_g and negative_prompt_text_g - two strings, into your positive and negative CLIP Text Encode nodes.

Installing it

ComfyUI Manager: search SDXL Prompt Styler (wolfden), install, restart. Manual:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/wolfden/ComfyUi_PromptStylers

Restart ComfyUI. No dependencies, no models to download. Find the styler nodes under a Style Prompts submenu.

Common issues

Don't double up on lighting. If your positive already says "bright noon sun" and you apply Night, you've handed the model a contradiction. Strip lighting words from your subject text and let the node own them.

none is a passthrough. The first entry, none byTimeofDay, changes nothing by design.

Interiors ignore it more. Time-of-day cues are strongest on outdoor scenes with visible sky and natural light. An indoor subject responds less - you'll get some warmth or coolness, but not a dramatic swing.

SDXL-family tool. These templates use SDXL-style tag prompting and a live negative prompt. The lighting words help somewhat anywhere, but the negative half is inert at CFG 1 on distilled or LLM-encoded models - so run this on an SDXL checkpoint for the intended result.