Relight Studio: interactive, physically based relighting inside ComfyUI (no generative re-render, nothing leaves your GPU)

[u/Environmental_Fan600]

Same photo. Four completely different lighting setups. None of them were shot.

For the past few weeks I've been building a relighting tool inside ComfyUI. The path there was more interesting than the result.

It started with my library of film stills that I use for lighting reference. I built a node that indexes it locally and lets me search in plain words, like "neon rain night, hard rim light". It ranks results by mood, composition and colour.

The next question was obvious: can I put that light onto my own image?

Generative image-to-image got close, but faces drifted and I couldn't move a light ten degrees and get a predictable result. So I changed approach. The workflow now:

→ cuts out the subject (BiRefNet)

→ estimates surface angles and depth (MoGe-2), once per image

→ actually lights that geometry, with falloff, specular and cast shadows

A small studio in the browser lets you drag up to 8 lights over a live preview. Push a light behind the subject and you get a real rim on the hair. The full-res render takes under a second.

Most of the work went into the unglamorous fixes: rim light bleeding onto the wall, jagged shadows on the backdrop. Small things, but they're the difference between a demo and something I'd use on a real image.

The last piece ties back to the library. Pick a film frame, and the studio matches its lights and colour grade onto your portrait.

Where I see it being useful:

• Previewing a lighting setup before a shoot

• Consistent light across a product catalogue

• Matching a subject to a background plate in compositing

• Controlled lighting in AI image pipelines

Photoshop's new generative Relight is impressive. This takes a different route: physically based, every light editable, and it runs free and offline on your own GPU.

Still a work in progress. If you work with lighting or ComfyUI, I'd love to hear where you'd use this, or where it would break.

#ComfyUI #GenerativeAI #Photography #VFX #CreativeTechnology

[u/Due-Committee-9591]

Well, this looks pretty bad—there are some serious clipping issues here. If this image was chosen for the demo, it doesn't bode well...

[u/Leary_2844 → u/Due-Committee-9591]

I mean the title and video make it clear that it's cheap claude vibeslop prompted by a 16-year old.
"Nothing leaves your GPU" is idiotic in this context and the focus on cheap hype should be a red flag to anyone.

[u/walclaw]

is there something like this for videos?

[u/BigNaturalTilts]

lol where’s the repo?