Character Studio — Portret-prompt

Every portrait you generate starts with you re-typing the same wall of text: age, build, skin, hair, eyes, wardrobe, "shot on 85mm at f/2.8". Character Studio - Portret-prompt is a single node that turns that wall into ~38 dropdowns and text fields, then assembles a complete natural-language prompt for you. Same fields in, same structured prompt out - which is the whole point. It's not a LoRA, not a control net, not an IP-adapter. It's just very disciplined prompt-writing, and it doesn't call any API, needs no key, and ships zero model files.

What it actually is

The author (Perry76 on GitHub, PerryD1976 on Reddit) built a local "character studio" webapp - FastAPI orchestrator, React UI, ComfyUI as the render engine - and pulled the prompt-composition piece out of it into this standalone node. It's MIT-licensed and genuinely dependency-free: Python standard library only, nothing to pip install, nothing to download.

Under the hood it's manifest-driven. The node reads a bundled cast_character.manifest.json, which holds a fixed template plus every field's options. Each dropdown is literally a list from that manifest - 192 nationalities in origin, 19 ages, 140+ hair styles, 80+ poses, 60+ lighting options. You pick values, the node fills the template via a small compose_form function, cleans up double commas and stray spaces, and hands you one STRING.

The template ends with a block that shows exactly whose prior this node is fighting: "Photoreal, natural unretouched skin texture, subtle facial asymmetry, lifelike detailed eyes, natural color, authentic, unfiltered." That's the "skincare-ad default" complaint from r/StableDiffusion's photorealism canon - glossy skin and a symmetric face are the number-one AI tell, and this template pushes back on both before you even touch a slider.

The inputs that matter

You don't need to touch all 38. Every field has a sensible default, so an untouched node still emits a coherent, fully-clothed portrait prompt - which is the other deliberate choice: leave wardrobe empty and it substitutes "casual everyday clothing" rather than render a nude subject.

The few you'll actually set:

• origin, gender, age, build_type, height - the identity block. Dropdowns, all with defaults.
• shot_type - defaults to a three-panel reference sheet (front full-body, back full-body, tight portrait). That's the "character bible" workflow this node was built around: one generation that captures the whole character.
• camera_type, focal_length, aperture, camera_angle - "Shot on full-frame digital at 85mm, f/2.8, eye level." Naming a physical camera is the highest-leverage phrase for LLM-encoded models (Flux, Qwen, Z-Image), per the KB; on SDXL-lineage checkpoints it does less.
• extra - the one free-text escape hatch. It's appended verbatim to the end of the prompt, so use it for scene or mood one-offs the dropdowns can't express.

Output: a single STRING named prompt. That's it.

Installing it

Manager covers this pack - search "character-studio-prompt". Or the old-fashioned way:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/Perry76/character-studio-prompt.git

Restart ComfyUI. No requirements.txt, no model downloads, no conflicts to babysit - refreshing after the ecosystem essay's horror stories about node dependency hell. It appears under Add Node → Character Studio → Portret-prompt.

The trap that will eat 20 minutes

The prompt output is a STRING, but a CLIP Text Encode's text field is a widget by default - you can't just drag one onto the other. Right-click CLIP Text Encode (Prompt) → Convert Widget to Input → text, then drag prompt into that new input. Do this once and it's second nature, but it's the question on every beginner thread about this node.

Two more notes. First: the camera wording only works if your model speaks optics - one user on the author's launch thread reported "camera angle has no effect" on Krea2. On booru-tag models, treat those fields as garnish. Second, the dropdowns are fixed lists; you can't type a custom nationality or hairstyle in. That's what extra is for, and a Show Text node is the way to capture the full prompt so you can reuse it across runs.

It's a niche convenience node, not a hype train - zero impressions, one developer, actively iterating (the lighting and backdrop dropdowns were added after community request). If you batch-test character LoRAs or keep re-describing the same person, it earns its place fast. If you only generate one-off images, it's a fun way to stop forgetting the freckles.