💡 Z2J Lighting

Lighting is where generated text earns its keep. Anyone can type "cinematic lighting," and the model yawns; describe a Rembrandt setup with a warm fill and a cool rim, and the image visibly changes. Z2J Lighting is the node that manufactures those real lighting recipes for you - and its default profile is the biggest in the ComfyUI-Zero2JSON pack, roughly 700,000 combinations of source, quality, direction, color temperature and mood. It's the node this pack is best at, and the one I'd reach for first if I could only keep a couple.

In the FLUX2-JSON workflow it feeds the lighting field of the prompt assembler. Given how strongly FLUX2's LLM-style encoder responds to structured descriptive blocks, a generated line like "softbox lighting from the side, Rembrandt, warm golden tones, intimate mood" is the difference between a flat render and one that looks lit on purpose.

How it works

Position-as-seed, same as every node here: (seed, prompt_index, slot) hashed with xxhash32, hash selects a template and one option per pool. The lighting_default.json profile has 4 templates over five pools - source (15), quality (12), direction (12), color_temp (9), mood (9). The direction pool is genuinely film-school vocabulary: split lighting, Rembrandt, butterfly, loop, broad, short. That's the part people under-prompt most and the part this node nails.

The inputs that matter

• seed - world seed.
• prompt_index - position coordinate; farm this to walk light setups.
• profile - dropdown of lighting_*.json files; drop a custom one into profiles/ and restart.
• prefix / suffix - anchors around the lighting line.
• lighting_type and lighting_mood - filter dropdowns (natural/studio/dramatic… and bright/dark/moody…). Fine print: in v1.0.0 as shipped, both are declared in the UI but ignored by the generator. They don't filter yet. Check for a newer release before relying on them.

Output is a single text string.

Install

One repo holds all seventeen nodes:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/MushroomFleet/ComfyUI-Zero2JSON
cd ComfyUI-Zero2JSON
pip install -r requirements.txt

Restart ComfyUI. The requirements file is one line - xxhash>=3.0.0. No models, no API keys. Manager users: search "ComfyUI-Zero2JSON".

Where people get burned

Don't let the generated lighting contradict the scene's stated light source. "Moonlight" from the lighting node against "bright sunny day" from the scene node is a recipe for a muddy compromise - pick one dominant light and let the other nodes defer to it. The other real-world trap is over-specifying: five lighting descriptors can start fighting each other. Let this node own the light, keep mood as a light touch, and your renders will read as lit instead of lit-up. And yes - an unconnected text output shows nothing, so wire it to the FLUX2 field or a text display first.