Blur Masked Area

The gentler sibling of Fill Masked Area. Instead of replacing the masked region with flat grey or an OpenCV-computed fill, this node blurs the existing image into the mask - so whatever colors and general shapes were already there survive, softened, rather than being wiped out entirely. It's the pre-processing pick when you want the model to change detail without changing the overall palette.

Where it fits versus Fill Masked Area

Both are pre-processing nodes that run before your sampler, and both exist for the same reason: give the model a sensible starting point instead of raw pixels under a mask. The difference is what they preserve. Fill Masked Area erases what was there (grey, or an inpainted guess from the border). Blur Masked Area keeps it, just fuzzy - useful when the rough colors are right and you only need the sampler to add or fix detail, not repaint from scratch.

Inputs and outputs

• image / mask - as usual.
• blur (INT, default 255, min 3, max 8191) - the blur radius. Worth flagging: that default is much larger than what a typical photo-editor blur slider tops out at. At 255 you're not softening detail, you're smearing the masked region into something close to a solid average color - which is often exactly what you want here, but it's easy to expect something gentler and be surprised.
• falloff (INT, default 0) - softens the transition at the mask edge, same idea as in Fill Masked Area.

Output is a single image.

Installing it

Part of the same pack as everything else here - through ComfyUI Manager (search "ComfyUI Inpaint Nodes"), or manually:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/Acly/comfyui-inpaint-nodes.git

Restart ComfyUI afterward. No OpenCV dependency for this one - that requirement only applies to Fill Masked Area's telea/navier-stokes modes.

Common issues

Blur value looking way too strong at first. That's the 255 default doing its job - it's designed to get you close to a flat average color across the masked region, not a light softening. If you want more of the original detail to survive into the sampler, drop the value down; you don't need to go anywhere near the 8191 ceiling for normal use.

Wrong tool for full replacement. If you're regenerating the masked area at denoise 1.0 with nothing of the original meant to carry through, this node buys you nothing - the sampler will overwrite the blur anyway. It earns its keep specifically in lower-denoise refinement passes where the underlying colors matter.

Pairs naturally with feathered masks. If your mask itself already has soft edges (from Expand Mask's blur option, say), the falloff here can often stay at 0 - you don't need two layers of edge softening doing the same job.