Icy LoadImageMask

IcyLoadImageMask is how you turn a prepared mask image into an actual MASK tensor for ComfyUI's inpainting machinery. You've got a black-and-white PNG where white marks the region to regenerate? This node loads it and hands you a mask you can feed into SetLatentNoiseMask or an inpainting sampler. That's the entire job, and it's a job worth having on speed dial.

The "Icy" prefix is the pack's privacy coat, not a different mask loader. IcyHider subclasses core ComfyUI nodes at startup - identical inputs, outputs, and behavior, filed under the IcyHider Comfy Core category - and its JavaScript hides the preview until you hover. So this is core LoadImageMask with a cover, which honestly matters here more than you'd think: mask images are often your reference image's silhouette, and that silhouette may be exactly what you don't want visible on screen.

The two inputs

From the schema:

• image - dropdown of files in your ComfyUI/input folder.
• channel - which channel to read the mask from: alpha, red, green, or blue. Alpha is the common one if you've prepared a transparent PNG; red/green/blue let you abuse a color channel as a mask, which is a legit trick for packing multiple masks into one image.

One output: MASK.

Where it plugs in

The standard masked-inpainting graph is: LoadImage → VAE Encode → SetLatentNoiseMask (with this node's MASK) → KSampler → VAEDecode. The mask tells the sampler which region to denoise and which to leave alone. The KB's inpainting essay is worth a read here, because its key warning applies: the mask is only as good as the unmasked pixels staying put. Keep denoise low-ish and the mask tight around what you actually want changed.

A detail people trip on: mask values are grayscale, not binary. A soft gray edge means partial influence, which is often what you want for blends - but if you're getting weird half-effected regions, your mask has gray in it. Check your source image's actual pixel values.

Install and gotchas

Frontend-only pack, no dependencies:

# ComfyUI Manager: search "IcyHider", Install, restart

# or:
cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/icekiub-ai/ComfyUI-IcyHider.git
# restart ComfyUI

Pack-wide: the cover is DOM-based, so the newer Nodes 2.0 canvas frontend may not hide previews, and hiding is screen-only - the source mask file stays in your input folder. If Avalanche mode is on, remember the whole graph hides until you select a node; that surprises people the first time they run the pack.