Mikey Sampler Tiled Advanced

This is the node that shows up in real beginner threads when someone asks how to add a hi-res fix to their SDXL workflow. On r/StableDiffusion, a user trying to figure out upscaling got a straightforward answer: swap your VAE Decode for the Mikey Sampler Tiled Advanced node, and you've got tiled upscaling with a comparison output baked in - no need to hand-assemble an Ultimate SD Upscale chain from scratch. That's a real, specific recommendation, not marketing copy, and it's worth knowing this pack has earned that kind of word-of-mouth.

It's the "big brother" of Mikey Sampler Tiled - same base→refiner→upscale→tile shape, but with everything exposed instead of defaulted. Where the plain version locks you into fixed sampling behavior, this one gives you steps, cfg, sampler_name (44 choices, from the standard euler/dpm_2 family through more exotic ones), and scheduler (9 choices) - meaning you can match whatever settings your main generation pass is already using instead of trusting a different implicit default in the upscale stage.

The inputs that matter beyond the standard sampler set: denoise_image controls how much the tile pass reworks the upscaled image (0–1, similar territory to tiler_denoise on the simpler node). smooth_step (default 1, range -1 to 100) is a Mikey-specific trick from the README: the base sampler deliberately skips a step mid-generation and tacks it onto the end instead, which adds extra fine detail; smooth_step controls how many extra steps go into that final cleanup, and the README recommends dropping it to -1 for very busy images that need more detail work. use_complexity_score (default true) is the automatic guard that stops the final pass from over-processing flat, simple regions like faces - turn it off only if you want raw, literal control and are willing to risk the scrambled-face artifact it exists to prevent. There's also an optional image_optional input: feed an existing image in and you can skip generation entirely, using this node purely as a tile-upscale-and-detail pass on something you already made. Outputs are tiled_image and upscaled_image, same pairing as the simpler node.

Installing it

Comes with the full Mikey Nodes pack. Through ComfyUI Manager, search "Mikey Nodes." Manually:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/bash-j/mikey_nodes

Restart ComfyUI. Same requirement as the non-advanced version: you need an upscale model in ComfyUI/models/upscale_models - the README suggests lollipop for balance, or 4x-UltraSharp / NMKD Superscale for sharper results, all from OpenModelDB. Nothing ships with the pack automatically.

Common issues

The upscale-model-folder-is-empty issue is the same as the simpler node - check it first if model_name shows nothing to pick. Beyond that, this node's extra knobs are also extra ways to get it wrong: mismatching sampler_name/scheduler between your base generation and this tile pass can produce a visibly different texture between the original and refined regions, so if you want a seamless result, mirror whatever combination your main KSampler is already using rather than picking something new here. If faces are coming out warped, check use_complexity_score is still on before touching anything else - that's specifically the safety net the README describes, and turning it off without realizing is an easy way to reintroduce the exact problem it was built to solve.