Manga Lineart (aka lineart_anime_denoise)

This is the line extractor built for messy source material - manga pages, compressed anime screenshots, scans with screentone and JPEG junk. Under the hood it's the lineart_anime_denoise preprocessor: it denoises the image before pulling line art out, so the halftone dots, compression artifacts, and grain don't end up baked into your line map. The result is clean anime-style lines you can feed a lineart ControlNet to recolor, restyle, or redraw the scene. If you've tried the plain Anime Lineart node on a manga scan and gotten a speckled mess, this is the node you actually wanted.

Why the denoise step matters

Manga and low-quality anime frames are hostile to edge extraction. Screentone (those halftone dot patterns) reads as thousands of tiny edges; JPEG compression adds blocky noise; scans add grain. A naive line extractor faithfully captures all of it, and now your "line art" is a snowstorm the ControlNet can't follow. Manga Lineart runs a denoising pass first - the _denoise in its name - so it separates the real strokes from the noise floor and hands you only the intended linework. That's the whole reason to pick it over the standard Anime Lineart node when your source is rough.

The inputs and output

There's essentially nothing to tune, which is fine - the denoising is doing the work:

• image - your source, ideally a manga page, screenshot, or noisy drawing.
• resolution (default 512) - working size; match it to your generation resolution. Higher captures finer lines but also gives the denoiser more noise to wade through, so don't crank it blindly. The PixelPerfectResolution node can compute the ideal number.

The single output is an IMAGE - clean white lines on black - that wires into a ControlNet Apply node with an anime lineart ControlNet (control_v11p_sd15s2_lineart_anime, the same one the plain Anime Lineart node targets). The node makes the hint; the ControlNet model is a separate download.

Installing it

ComfyUI Manager: search ComfyUI's ControlNet Auxiliary Preprocessors, install, restart. Or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/Fannovel16/comfyui_controlnet_aux
pip install -r requirements.txt

Restart ComfyUI. The manga line-extraction weight (erika.pth) downloads from HuggingFace on first run.

Where people get burned

First, the standard one: no anime lineart ControlNet loaded, no effect - the lines are just a picture until a ControlNet consumes them. Second, know when not to use it: on a clean, high-quality illustration the denoise pass is unnecessary and can slightly soften genuinely fine linework - for pristine art, the plain Anime Lineart node is the better match. This node earns its keep specifically on noisy input. Third, denoise isn't magic: if your source is extremely degraded - heavy screentone over the whole page, or a tiny low-res thumbnail - some detail is simply gone, and you may need to upscale or clean the image before extraction. Think of Manga Lineart as "Anime Lineart, but robust to garbage input." That's exactly the job, and it does it well.