⚡| Image Filter

Image Filter is the "finish the job" node in the Z-Image Power Nodes pack. Z-Image Turbo gets you 90% of the way in 8 steps, and this is for the other 10%: a compact color-grading box you drop between the decoder and the save/preview node. It stacks up to three filter layers with individual intensity controls, plus an optional auto-contrast pass that fixes washed-out output.

It's worth being clear about what it is not. It's not a photo editor, and it's not an upscaler - it's a handful of opinionated color/tone corrections tuned for the look that Z-Image tends to produce (a bit flat, occasionally washed out, especially at lower steps). If your pipeline already has a favorite post-processing chain (Color Match, Image Adjust, whatever), you probably don't need this. If you just want "slightly punchier and it's done," this is the one-button version.

How it works

The node runs each layer in sequence: pick an effect, nudge its tweak between −0.5 and 0.5 (0 is the author's stated baseline), and it applies. Then the next layer applies on top. The available effects are deliberately short: bw (black & white), color (color level), color_pop (punch up color), color_twist (hue twist), and contrast (brightness curve). There are also enable_auto_contrast and enable_effects master switches, so you can A/B your whole grade against the untouched image without rewiring anything.

The inputs that matter

• images (IMAGE) - the decoded output, e.g. from AdvancedVAEDecoder or plain VAEDecode.
• enable_effects (BOOL) - master bypass for the three layers.
• enable_auto_contrast (BOOL) - automatic dynamic-range fix for washed-out tones. This one's the sleeper; it alone fixes a lot of low-step Z-Image flatness.
• effect_1 / effect_2 / effect_3 (COMBO) - choose from the five effects above per layer.
• effect_1_tweak / effect_2_tweak / effect_3_tweak (FLOAT, −0.5…0.5) - per-layer intensity. Zero is neutral, so "no tweak" just means "leave it at 0."

Output is a single IMAGE with all layers applied, in the same shape as the input batch.

Install

It ships in the Z-Image Power Nodes pack, so the routine is the same as every node in it:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/martin-rizzo/ComfyUI-ZImagePowerNodes

Restart ComfyUI (or ComfyUI Manager → "Z-Image Power Nodes"). No pip dependencies; pure ComfyUI.

Tips from real use

Layers compose, so the classic starter grade is contrast with a small positive tweak plus color_pop - it adds snap without going crunchy. Keep tweaks small; the range is −0.5 to 0.5 and it's genuinely sensitive past ±0.3. And use enable_auto_contrast as your first test before touching layers, because on many Z-Image outputs it does 80% of the work by itself. The one trap: it's sequential, not parallel - layer order changes the result, so if a grade looks muddy, reorder the layers before you start fighting individual tweaks.