Atlas Layer Preview 🎨

When you're stacking five projection layers in the atlas-camera 2.5D matte pipeline, the boring question becomes the important one: which layer am I looking at, and is it actually cut out yet? Atlas Layer Preview answers both with one image - the plate's pixels where this layer's matte is, and the layer's debug color everywhere else. That's the whole job, and it's a genuinely useful one.

It's a viewport/debug node in Atlas/07 · Clean Plate & Inpaint, the direct response to a piece of user feedback the pack's author quotes in the code: the old debug strip showed a mask preview and a plate preview, and the feedback was that it should only show already-cut-out layers so the mask preview isn't needed. This node is that fix.

How it works

You give it a layer's plate (post-inpaint) and that layer's matte, and it composites them - real plate pixels where the matte is, opaque debug color everywhere else. The color isn't arbitrary: it's the exact 🎨 Layers legend color the master viewport uses for that layer's position in projection_sources, so what you see in the preview matches what you'll see in the full scene. It replaces the old mask-preview-plus-plate-preview pair in the staged master's per-stage debug strip.

Inputs and outputs

Required inputs:

• image - the layer's plate, after inpainting.
• mask - the layer's matte (a band layer's layer_mask, or a sky mask).

Both are plain IMAGE/MASK types, so you can preview any layer you can build.

Optional inputs:

• layer_index - the layer's position in projection_sources, which is the same order as the 🎨 Layers legend. The tooltip spells out the staged-master convention: sky=0, far=1, bg=2, mid=3, fg=4. -1 is the primary, which renders as teal. This sets the opaque surround color.
• color_hex - an explicit hex override (e.g. ff6a3d) if you want a color that isn't in the palette.

Single output: image, ready to drop into any preview or save node.

Installing it

Core-tier node, no heavy dependencies. The pack's install applies as-is:

cd <ComfyUI>/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/mikejamesvfx/atlas-camera.git

Restart ComfyUI, find it under Atlas/07 · Clean Plate & Inpaint (or via ComfyUI Manager, searching "atlas-camera").

Common issues

If the surround color doesn't match what you expect, check layer_index against the legend order - the whole point is that the index is the color. Set it to -1 for the primary layer, which renders in teal. And if you're previewing a layer whose matte came out of a different resolution than its plate, resize the mask to the plate before wiring it in; the node does a straight per-pixel composite and won't warn you about a size mismatch.