Legacy2_ClownsharKSamplerGuide

This node is how you feed a RES4LYF sampler a guide - a latent that steers the generation toward a particular composition, color layout, or style without hard-locking it the way a fixed init image would. It's one of the pack's most-loved features. A regular community description puts it well: it sits somewhere in the neighborhood of img2img at high denoise, or unsampling / RF-inversion / an ad-hoc controlnet for models that don't have one. Great for guiding composition or color, or just nudging outputs away from the "person standing dead-center posing for the camera" default.

Heads up on the name: ComfyUI shows this as Legacy2_ClownsharKSamplerGuide, so it belongs to an older generation kept alive for existing workflows. The current guide nodes have different names, but the concept is identical and this still works.

How it works

You give it a guide latent and a guide_mode, and it produces a GUIDES object that plugs into a Clown sampler's guides input. The sampler then blends your guide into the denoising trajectory according to the mode and weight you chose, tapering off at a step you set so the model has room to finish on its own. This is a single-guide node - one guide, optionally masked. (If you want a foreground/background pair, that's the plural ClownsharKSamplerGuides.)

The inputs that matter

• guide_mode (default epsilon_projection) - how the guide is injected. There are 17 modes (epsilon, epsilon_projection, blend, hard_light, mean_std, plus dynamic-mean and background variants). epsilon-family modes are the common starting point; blend and the projection modes give softer or more literal adherence. This is the knob with the biggest effect on feel, so it's the one to experiment with.
• guide_weight (default 0.75) - how strongly the guide pulls. Higher tracks the guide more closely; lower lets the prompt lead.
• guide_end_step (default 15) - the step to stop guiding. Guide hard early for structure, release for detail. Ending too late can lock in the guide's texture; too early barely registers.
• guide_weight_scheduler (default beta57) - schedules how the weight changes over the guided steps rather than holding it flat.

Optional inputs: guide (the LATENT you're steering with - encode an image through a VAE to make one), guide_mask (a MASK to confine the guide to a region), and guide_weights (a SIGMAS curve for full manual control of the weight schedule). The single output is guides (GUIDES).

Installing it

ComfyUI Manager: search RES4LYF, install, restart. Manually:

cd custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/ClownsharkBatwing/RES4LYF/
cd RES4LYF
pip install -r requirements.txt

pip install inside the venv (or portable Python), restart, hard-refresh F5. No models to download - but you'll need a VAE Encode in your graph to turn a reference image into the guide latent.

Common issues

The most common "it's not working" is simply that the GUIDES output isn't wired into the sampler's guides input, or that guide_weight is too low to see. Turn it up, or drop the guide_end_step later, to confirm the guide is actually biting - then dial back. If you're doing style transfer, the readme's advice is worth heeding: try with the guide off first to confirm your prompt isn't doing the heavy lifting, because a strong style word in the prompt can mask what the guide is contributing. And since this is a Legacy2 node, expect its exact settings to differ slightly from the newest tutorials. If it won't load, RES4LYF isn't installed.