  Solar flares with a broadband emission in the white-light range of the
electromagnetic spectrum belong to most enigmatic phenomena on the Sun. The
origin of the white-light emission is not entirely understood. We aim to
systematically study the visible-light emission connected to solar flares in
SDO/HMI observations. We developed a code for automatic detection of kernels of
flares with HMI intensity brightenings and study properties of detected
candidates. The code was tuned and tested and with a little effort, it could be
applied to any suitable data set. By studying a few flare examples, we found
indication that HMI intensity brightening might be an artefact of the
simplified procedure used to compute HMI observables.
