Adaptive Sharpening | Deforum

Animation frames come out of a sampler soft. Video compression, motion blur, and diffusion's general mushy-ness all conspire to make a 120-frame Deforum render look flatter than the single images you're used to seeing. Adaptive Sharpening is the cheap post-pass that puts the edge back: it takes an IMAGE, sharpens it, and returns an IMAGE of the same shape - ready to chain after the VAE decode and before the Save Video.

Let's be honest about the name, though. "Adaptive" suggests it's measuring your image and tuning itself per region. It isn't. Under the hood it's textbook unsharp masking: blur a copy with a Gaussian, then blend the original with the blurred copy at a negative alpha - which subtracts the low-frequency blur and leaves the high-frequency detail boosted. That's the classic recipe the whole ecosystem runs on (the KB's post-processing essay spells out the same mechanics: blur, subtract, add back scaled).

The knobs that matter

• intensity - FLOAT, default 0.7, range 0–2. How hard the detail gets boosted. This is the "amount" of your unsharp mask. Crank it past ~1 and you'll start seeing halos around edges - that white fringe is the tell-tale sign you overshot. 0.5–0.8 is a sensible home for video frames.
• radius - FLOAT, default 1.1, range 0.1–3. The size of the Gaussian blur, i.e. what counts as detail. Small radius sharpens fine texture; big radius sharpens larger structure and brings more halos with it.

Because it's deterministic and instant (pure PIL, no model), it's the right tool for a whole frame batch: the same settings apply to every frame, no flicker from frame-to-frame variation.

Where it fits

After decode, before save - or between Color Correction | Deforum and the final output for the classic "fix the color, then crisp it" chain. If you're already running Color Correction + Sharpening | Deforum, that node does this exact sharpening step internally, so don't stack both or you'll double-halo.

Installing it

Ships in deforum-comfy-nodes, the official Deforum ComfyUI pack. ComfyUI Manager: search "deforum" (comfyui-deforum), install, restart. Manual:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/deforum-art/deforum-comfy-nodes

Restart ComfyUI after. No extra dependencies, no model downloads - PIL does the work. Load errors after upgrades: check for an orphaned deforum pip package and pip uninstall deforum it.