CS Color Grade

CS Color Grade is the node to reach for when your AI video comes out technically correct and completely flat. It's a full grade - white balance, exposure, contrast, saturation, per-channel curves, plus external LUT support - applied to image or video frame batches, with an interactive preview window so you can actually see what you're doing. If you've been "fixing colors" by rerunning the sampler with a different prompt, stop. This is the deterministic, millisecond version of that job, and it's why the node exists.

It's a port of After Effects' AFX Grade effect, and it shows. The grade pipeline is the classic chain: white balance, offset/multiply/gamma, brightness, contrast, Rec.709-weighted saturation, per-channel RGB adjustments, PCHIP curves, then an optional external .cube LUT on top with its own strength control. The white point is a #RRGGBB hex string that gets converted to linear Rec.709 and normalized by channel mean - so pointing it at a neutral gray in your footage actually fixes the cast rather than just tinting things warmer or cooler. Color Temperature and Tint are the two sliders you'll adjust most, with Offset/Multiply/Gamma as the exposure core.

The inputs that matter

You don't need every input to get value. The short list:

• image - a standard IMAGE, single frame or a whole video batch (RGBA input just ignores the alpha channel).
• mask - optional. Black keeps the source, white applies the full grade, and gray values blend linearly. That's how you grade only the sky or only a face.
• Load LUT / LUT Strength - pick a .cube file from ComfyUI/models/luts (choose None to skip), then blend it in 0–1. Most of the "cinematic look" people buy LUT packs for lives here.
• White Point, Color Temperature, Tint - the white balance trio.

The rest - the RGB arrays, the curves JSON - are advanced fields you usually won't touch directly. You'll edit those in the preview window instead.

The Grade Preview window is the real UI

The node opens a front-end window that's honestly nicer than what most desktop NLEs give you. Left/right Result-versus-Original comparison with a draggable divider, a timeline to scrub frames, 50/100/200% zoom, a color picker for the white point, and a curve editor with RGB/R/G/B channels. You tweak, it re-renders just the current frame, and Apply to Node writes the whole parameter set back. That workflow - preview on one frame, apply, run the batch - is the entire point, and it's the reason you'd pick this over hand-typing values.

Install and gotchas

ComfyUI Manager, search "ComfyUI_CineStyle", install - or cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes && git clone https://github.com/chflame163/ComfyUI_CineStyle and restart. The nodes live under 😺dzNodes/CineStyle. One thing to know up front: this pack is written against ComfyUI's newer backend node API (the "V3 schema" - zero NODE_CLASS_MAPPINGS anywhere), so it needs a reasonably recent ComfyUI. Nodes missing from the menu after install? Update ComfyUI first.

Where people get burned:

• Drop a .cube into models/luts and it doesn't appear in the dropdown. The list is scanned when the node loads - refresh the node list or restart ComfyUI.
• The fancy preview says "no source." If your image comes from a node that generates at runtime (not a loader), run the workflow once first so it builds a preview cache, then open Grade Preview. This is a recurring pattern across the whole CineStyle pack.
• The auto-preview is only guaranteed when the video comes from the pack's own CS Load Video.

It's new - the whole pack is a few weeks old as of writing, so expect the occasional rough edge. But the core grade is solid torch math, runs fast on a frame batch, and needs no model downloads at all. For the color pass on your video, this is the one I'd reach for.