LASED Overlay

Every LASED swarm node hands you an edge map, and a raw edge map on its own is a gray smudge of pheromone. LASED Overlay is the node that turns it into something you'd actually look at: the glowing contour composited back over the source image, in the color you pick. It's the payoff step at the end of every example workflow, and it does exactly one thing well.

You feed it the original image and the edge_map from any LASED swarm node - Swarm Edge, Multi-Seed, Food Map, they all work. It blends the two wherever the edge map is above a threshold, and passes everything else through untouched.

The inputs, which are few

• color - a hex color string, default #00FFFF (cyan). Any #RRGGBB works, and three-digit shorthand is accepted. Get the format wrong and it raises an error, so if nothing renders, check the hash.
• alpha - opacity of the glow, default 0.85. This is your "how loud" knob.
• threshold - edge intensity below this is left untouched, default 0.05. This is the quiet hero. Edge pheromone fields are full of faint residue from ants wandering; the threshold kills the speckle so only real contours glow. If the overlay looks dirty, raise it; if the contour you want is too faint to show, lower it.

Output is a single image. That's it.

What it's for

Three things, honestly. The immediate one is previewing: you're iterating on tolerance and seed points, and you need to see what the swarm decided. The overlay makes that a one-glance read. Second, it's the compositing step for sharing or saving - lased_smoke.json chains Swarm Edge → Overlay → save, and that's the whole "look what the ants found" loop. Third, it's a genuinely handy debugging view: a contour that looks great in cyan on top of the real image tells you immediately whether LASED actually found your region or a neighboring one.

One important boundary: this node composites; it does not threshold. If you need a binary mask - for inpainting, compositing, or a ControlNet scribble condition - take the mask output from the swarm node instead. The overlay is for eyes, not for pipelines. (If it's a clean, exportable binary contour you're after, keep mode on masking at the source and you'll get that from the MASK socket directly.)

Install

The whole pack installs the same way: ComfyUI Manager search for ComfyUI-LASED-mask, or git clone https://github.com/MushroomFleet/ComfyUI-LASED-mask into custom_nodes and restart. No model downloads, numpy-only core. Because the edge map gets resampled to the image's dimensions internally, you don't have to match resolutions between the two inputs by hand - just connect and look.