SharpnessPro · Clarté

If you've ever pulled the Clarity slider in Lightroom and watched a flat render suddenly develop "presence" - that slightly gritty, sculpted look without any edge sharpening - this is that, inside ComfyUI. It's easy to confuse Clarity with sharpening, and the pack's whole Tone category exists to stop you doing that. Sharpening touches edges; Clarity touches midtones, giving the image a sense of relief and depth without ever making it look more detailed.

How it works

Mechanically it's unsharp mask with two big twists. First, the radius is huge by default (24) - so the "detail" it's boosting is large-scale tonal variation, not fine edges. That's what turns a flat wall of midtone into something with structure and depth. Second, and this is the clever bit, the effect is gated through a midtone mask: a soft cosine ramp centered on middle gray that fades the effect to zero as pixels head toward deep shadows or bright highlights.

That mask is why Clarity doesn't blow out your sky or crush your blacks the way a naive contrast boost would. It's doing locally what a tone curve does globally, but it only operates in the middle of the range where the "punch" lives.

Because the strength can go negative, it's also a legit softening tool: pull strength below zero and the same midtone mechanism smooths out texture instead of adding it.

The inputs that matter

• radius (default 24, range 1–200) - leave it big. This is the one slider people get wrong: if you shrink it toward 5, you're sliding back into Texture/edge territory and losing the point.
• strength (default 0.35, range −1 to 1) - the intensity. Negative values soften instead of punch.
• midtone_softness (default 0.35) - how wide the midtone band is. Lower = the effect hugs a strict band around middle gray; higher = it bleeds further into shadows and highlights.
• luma_only (Yes/No) - run the effect on luminance only to protect colors. The safer choice for most images.

It takes an IMAGE and outputs an IMAGE. The README's framing is worth respecting here: the Tone nodes (Clarity, Texture) can be used earlier in the workflow to sculpt light and material, with the actual sharpening left for the very end before save.

Install

ComfyUI Manager → search SharpnessPro → Install, then restart. Or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes/
git clone https://github.com/orion4d/ComfyUI_SharpnessPro.git

No dependencies beyond what ComfyUI already ships, no models, no downloads. It's a few PyTorch convolutions - instant.

Common issues

People mostly trip on the mental model, not the node. If you're expecting crispness, you'll be disappointed - Clarity won't sharpen anything. If the image starts looking over-baked and slightly hazy at the edges of the range, that's the mask letting effect bleed into shadows/highlights: drop midtone_softness a bit or back off strength. And if you see color shifts on skin tones, flip luma_only to Yes before you blame the node.