LayerFilter: Sharp & Soft

Sometimes you just want to sharpen the image a bit, or take the edge off, and you don't want to think about it. Sharp & Soft is that node - a one-dial sharpen/blur with presets instead of sliders. No radius, no threshold, no unsharp-mask math to tune. You pick a strength from a dropdown and move on. It's the definition of a quick-and-dirty finishing touch, and there's nothing wrong with that.

The mechanism is a preset enhancement filter. Behind the single control it's applying a sharpening or softening convolution at a fixed strength per option - the kind of thing you'd otherwise set up with a blur node and a blend, collapsed into one choice. That's the entire appeal: it trades the fine control of a proper sharpen node for the speed of not configuring anything.

There are exactly two inputs and that's the whole node. images is what you feed in. enhance is the dropdown, with five options: very sharp, sharp, soft, very soft, and None. The two sharp levels crisp up detail - good for perking up a slightly soft render or emphasizing texture before you save. The two soft levels blur - handy for knocking back over-sharp AI output, faking a shallow-focus feel, or gently smoothing a background layer before compositing. None is a pass-through, which is more useful than it sounds: leave the node wired in and flip to None to A/B the effect without deleting anything from your graph.

One output: image, the filtered result. Drop it wherever you'd put a finished image. The input is named images for a reason - feed it a batch and every frame gets the same treatment, which is handy for keeping a video sequence or a set of variations consistent.

A couple of real uses beyond the obvious "make it crisper." The soft settings are a cheap fake depth-of-field trick: run a masked background layer through "very soft" before compositing your (sharp) subject back on top, and you get a shallow-focus look without a depth model. And a gentle "soft" pass is a quick way to tame the over-sharp, crunchy edges some upscalers leave behind, right before you add grain.

Install is the pack standard: search "ComfyUI Layer Style" in ComfyUI Manager, or cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes && git clone https://github.com/chflame163/ComfyUI_LayerStyle, then pip install -r requirements.txt and restart. No models - instant.

Set expectations correctly and you'll be happy with it: this is a preset, not a precision tool. If you need to sharpen exactly this much at exactly this radius, or sharpen only the eyes, this node won't give you that control - reach for a dedicated unsharp/detail node or a masked sharpen instead. What Sharp & Soft is for is the fast pass: the render came out a touch soft, tick "sharp," done; the output looks over-crisp and digital, tick "soft," done. Used that way it's one of the friendliest nodes in the pack. The only real failure mode is the pack itself - LayerStyle is prone to "failed to import" errors from dependency conflicts, and if the pack doesn't load, even a trivial filter like this won't appear. If it's missing, check the console, hit "Try Fix" in Manager, and reinstall the requirements.