Inpaint Crop Pro

Inpaint Crop Pro is the first half of the crop-and-stitch inpainting pattern that changed how the community edits images. The pattern comes from lquesada's ComfyUI-Inpaint-CropAndStitch: instead of running a diffusion model over the whole frame (which passes everything through VAE encode/decode and degrades pixels you didn't want touched), you crop tight around the mask, sample the crop at high resolution, and stitch it back. The unmasked part of the image never goes through the model at all - that's the property that made the pattern win. A 64px eye gets 1024px of generation budget.

This node is the lquesada API reimplemented and extended, inside ComfyUI-CustomNodePacks (the ~72-node pack from Code2Collapse / Likhith-24). It's the flagship of the author's C2C/Inpaint suite, and it produces the data structure (stitcher) that the pack's Paste Back and Stitch Pro nodes consume.

How it works

Feed it an image and a mask (white = the region to inpaint) and it:

1. Computes the mask's bounding box, then grows it by context_from_mask_extend_factor (default 1.2) so the crop includes context, not just the mask.
2. Resizes the crop to your target sampling resolution (output_target_width / output_target_height, default 512×512, padded to a multiple of output_padding, default 32).
3. Produces two separate masks: an inpaint_mask for the model (clean, in the crop's space) and a stitch_blend_mask for compositing back (feathered by mask_blend_pixels, default 32).
4. Hands you everything in one stitcher dict plus the cropped_image, inpaint_mask, stitch_blend_mask, and an info string.

The knobs a beginner actually sets:

• mask_blend_pixels (default 32, lquesada's number) - the feather width for the stitch seam. Too small → visible edge; too large → the inpainted region bleeds into untouched pixels.
• context_from_mask_extend_factor - how much context around the mask. 1.2-1.5 is a sane band.
• output_target_width / output_target_height - the resolution the sampler will work at. Bigger = more detail budget, more VRAM.
• extend_for_outpainting - with the four extend_*_factor inputs, edge-replicates the image so you can outpaint beyond the frame. The outpainting workflow lives here.
• roto_quality - the pack's "Roto-Sync" mode: tightens the seam for clean alpha edges, forcing a Laplacian pyramid blend. Great for masks that need crisp boundaries.

Outputs to remember: stitcher is the thing you must preserve and feed to the stitch node - losing it means rebuilding the crop. The info string is a diagnostic worth a glance before you spend a sampler run: it tells you what the crop stage actually decided (crop box, target size, padding).

The full loop

image + mask → Inpaint Crop Pro → cropped_image + inpaint_mask → [any inpaint sampler]
                          └────── stitcher ──────────────────────────────→ Inpaint Paste Back / Stitch Pro → final

Use any model on the crop - Flux, Qwen-Image, a plain SD inpaint - then close the loop with the pack's stitch node.

Installing it

Ships in ComfyUI-CustomNodePacks. ComfyUI Manager → search "CustomNodePacks", or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/Code2Collapse/ComfyUI-CustomNodePacks.git

Needs opencv-python>=4.7.0 and scipy>=1.10.0 (pack requirements - install just what's missing; the full requirements.txt can clobber ComfyUI's torch). No model downloads. Restart ComfyUI.

Common issues

• Visible seam after stitching - raise mask_blend_pixels, or switch the stitch side to Laplacian pyramid blending, which the pack's Stitch Pro handles.
• Crop too tight, model hallucinating - raise context_from_mask_extend_factor; the model needs context to know what it's inpainting into.
• Mask missing → whole image processed - mask is optional on this node; without it the behavior degrades toward full-frame. Wire a real mask.
• Model output misaligned or blurred - the KB notes even Qwen-Image-Edit-2509 misaligns slightly at native res; the crop-and-stitch pattern is precisely the community's fix for that, so keep output_target_* a multiple of the model's favorite resolution and let Stitch handle placement.

The honest take: this is the node the whole inpaint suite is built around, and it earns its keep - crop-and-stitch is the difference between "edit the whole image and hope" and "edit exactly the pixels you meant, at full detail."