CFG Scale

CFG scale is the dial that decides how hard the model steers toward your prompt at every denoising step. Raise it and the image obeys; lower it and it drifts free. It's also the setting you fiddle with more than any other, which is exactly why HelperNodes_CfgScale exists: one float on a wire, feeding your KSampler and your Save Image metadata from a single source.

The node is a FLOAT value with a slider from 0 to 10, defaulting at 8.0, stepping in 0.25 increments and rounding to two decimals. It outputs that value as CFG, ready to plug into KSampler's cfg input and HelperNodes_SaveImage's cfg input. That's the entire job.

How it works

No math happens here - it's a value node, the same trick as the rest of the pack. You set scale, it returns a FLOAT. What's slightly opinionated is the range. The pack's author capped it at 10, which is honestly a gift: above 10 you're just negotiating with a burn-in artifact. The 0.25 step is the right granularity for where people actually live (5, 6, 7, 8), and the two-decimal rounding keeps the metadata clean.

Inputs and outputs

• scale - FLOAT, 0.00–10.00, default 8.00, step 0.25.
• CFG output - the same value, typed FLOAT. Wire into KSampler cfg and Save Image cfg.

The honest take

The default of 8.0 is a very SD 1.5 instinct, and CFG has quietly stopped being a universal dial. The rule of thumb: 5–9 on SD 1.5 and SDXL, 4–6 on Pony and Illustrious, and roughly 1 on anything distilled - Turbo, Lightning, and the guidance-distilled checkpoints that now ship fixed near 1. At exactly 1, ComfyUI skips computing the negative pass entirely, which is a real speed win. So don't treat 8 as sacred; treat it as a starting point you'll move. The node just makes sure that wherever you land, the number flows everywhere it needs to and gets recorded in the file.

Install

Search ComfyUI-Helper-Nodes in ComfyUI Manager, or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/teward/ComfyUI-Helper-Nodes

Restart afterwards. Dependencies are numpy, pillow, piexif and whratio; the first two ship with ComfyUI already. No model downloads.

Troubleshooting

There's almost nothing to break here. If the slider won't go below 0 or above 10, that's the intended range, not a malfunction. If you're on a distilled model and your image looks overcooked, the fix is in the value, not the node - drag it to 1 and see the difference.