Veiling Glare PRO

Ever look at a photo taken slightly into the sun and notice the blacks aren't actually black - everything has a faint milky lift to it, like the image has a film of haze? That's veiling glare: light bouncing back and forth between the glass elements inside a lens and washing a faint glow across the whole frame. It's technically a lens defect, and it's also one of the strongest "this was captured by a real camera" signals there is, because AI renders almost never have it. Veiling Glare PRO is the pack's way of reintroducing it.

The name sounds intimidating; the effect is the opposite of aggressive. This is a contrast-softener, not a filter. It raises the black point and gently compresses contrast in proportion to the scene's own brightness, which reads as atmosphere rather than a fade.

How it works

The implementation is a clever cheat that's physically motivated. Veiling glare is basically extremely out-of-focus light hitting the sensor, so the node downscales the image dramatically (to a few hundred pixels), blurs that tiny version heavily, and upscales it back to full resolution. That upscaled blur is a "glare map" - it represents the average light energy of the scene smeared everywhere. It then applies a Screen blend (1 − (1 − image) × (1 − glare)), which brightens the image proportionally to the glare map. Net effect: darker areas get lifted more relative to their luminance, blacks grey out, contrast drops - exactly the "black lift" a hazy lens produces.

• dispersion (default 0.5, 0.1–1.0) controls how local the glare is. At 1.0 the glare is full-frame uniform (the classic haze); at 0.1 it stays localized around bright regions, closer to lens-flare-than-fog.
• glare_strength (default 0.1, 0–1) is how much of that glare map gets mixed in.

The inputs that matter

• image - the IMAGE to haze.
• glare_strength (default 0.1) - the amount of lift. Default is subtle; 0.2–0.3 is a clearly hazy look.
• dispersion (default 0.5) - localized vs. full-frame spread. Push toward 1 for uniform fog, toward 0.1 for glow around highlights only.

Output is a single IMAGE of the same size.

Installing it

Same pack as the rest - ComfyUI Manager → search "Post Processing PRO", or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/Guillaume-127/ConfyUI_Post_Processing_PRO

Restart. No requirements, no models; the downscale-blur-upscale trick means it's cheap even on CPU.

Where people get tripped up

The classic mistake is expecting this to be a fog or atmosphere node - it's not, and cranking glare_strength to 1 just gives you a washed-out grey mush, not cinematic mist. It's a contrast tool: use it at low strength to knock the harshness out of a render, and it does the same job as pulling black levels up 3–5% in a grade, but tied to the image's own light. For a filmic night or backlit shot, pair it with Halation PRO - halation blooms the bright speculars with red tint while veiling glare lifts the rest, and together they produce that analogue glow that's nearly impossible to get from a checkpoint alone.