The photon -- induced interactions, present in $ep$, $eA$, $pp$, $pA$, $AA$ and $e^+ e^-$ collisions, are expressed within the color dipole approach in terms of the photon wave function, which describes the transition of the photon into a quark -- antiquark color dipole. Such quantity is usually calculated using perturbation theory assuming that long distance corrections associated to strong interactions can be neglected. In this paper we investigate the impact of these nonperturbative QCD (npQCD) corrections to the description of the photon wave function for dipoles of large size in several observables measured at HERA, LEP and LHC. We assume a phenomenological ansatz for the treatment of these npQCD corrections and constrain the free parameters of our model using the experimental data for the photoproduction cross section. The predictions for the $gamma gamma$ cross section, exclusive $rho$ production in $ep$ collisions and the rapidity distribution for the $rho$ production in $PbPb$ collisions are compared with the data. We demonstrate that the inclusion of the nonperturbative QCD corrections improves the description of processes that are dominated by large dipoles.
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