Image Enhancement

Every texture pack has that one node you reach for because you don't want to string together four ComfyUI core nodes to do the same thing. Image Enhancement is TextureAlchemy's version: sharpen, contrast, and vibrance, all in one node, one pass, three sliders. Nothing clever, nothing hidden - it's the "make this image look more like itself" filter.

It lives in the Filters category of amtarr/ComfyUI-TextureAlchemy, the same pack that does the heavy Marigold/Lotus PBR extraction. And honestly, it's the kind of utility you'll use more than you expect: as a quick pop for an albedo that came out flat, as a detail boost before generating a roughness map, or as a pre-extraction cleanup that makes the AI's life easier.

How it works

Three independent adjustments on the input image:

• sharpen (0–2, default 0) - unsharp-style edge contrast. At 0 it's off; creep up to ~0.3–0.5 for photographic textures. Past about 1.2 you're chasing halos.
• contrast (0–3, default 1) - a multiplier on the value range. 1.0 is neutral, below 1 softens, above 1 pops. This is the one you'll touch most on washed-out albedos.
• vibrance (−1 to 1, default 0) - saturation that protects skin-tone-ish and neutral colors, so it saturates the colorful parts of a texture without making neutrals look radioactive. Negative values desaturate - a quick way to pull a color cast out of a material.

Output is a single enhanced IMAGE.

Where it slots in

The honest answer: put it right after loading your source and before the PBR chain. A photo with slightly soft focus and a mild color cast will extract noticeably cleaner normal and roughness maps if you sharpen 0.3, contrast 1.05, vibrance 0.1 first. It's also the fastest way to make two tiles from different sources feel like one material - same three sliders, roughly matching values, done.

Installing it

It ships inside TextureAlchemy:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/amtarr/ComfyUI-TextureAlchemy

restart ComfyUI, and it's under Texture Alchemist → Filters. Manager users: search "Texture Alchemy". No extra pip dependencies - plain PyTorch filters.

Gotchas

Two things worth knowing. First, this is a blunt instrument - it sharpens everything, including noise, so if your source is grainy you'll amplify the grain into the normal map. Run Denoise Filter before this, not after. Second, the sliders compound: sharpening a high-contrast image then pushing contrast again is how you end up with crunchy, haloed texture that looks great zoomed out and terrible up close. Small values, look at 100%, iterate. And if you only need one of the three adjustments, that's fine - set the other two to neutral (0 and 1) and it becomes a single-purpose node.